Lost and Found
by Borolin
Summary: When Snape is tortured and maimed a team inc. Hermione, Neville and a Muggle surgeon battle to save his life and sanity. Angst, friendship, humour, HGSS by whitehound and Dyce. Emotional, intelligent, thought provoking, tangible, compelling say reviewers
1. Prologue

**PROLOGUE**

This story is a collaborative piece which was initially inspired by another writer's story. Because its origin is very complicated, and I wanted to give credit to everybody involved, this first "chapter" is actually an overview of how the story came to be written and who contributed what. It does however have some story-content, in that it sets out where the story diverges from canon and from the fanfic on which it is based, and tells you what happened to get from the end of OotP to here.

The second "chapter" is actually a set of "the story so far" notes to help people remember where the story had got to, and is updated with each chapter. If you haven't already read the story so far then it's all spoilers!

**If you want to skip the explanations, the story proper starts at chapter #03 (_A Doctor in the House_) - but it's advisable to begin by reading _Missing in Action_, the fic of which this is a continuation, which can be found at ffn story ID 2412017 - and remember to review it separately from _Lost and Found_, since the reviews need to go to a different author. Just mentally knock off the last two paragraphs (the bit where Snape dies…), and then Read On.**

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Background and relationship to canon:

When I first read _Missing in Action_, by **Sheriff of Nottingham**, this intense and tragic tale obsessed me (**whitehound**) for weeks; partly because whenever I read a story in which something awful happens to somebody, especially Snape, I have a powerful urge to make things right for him, and partly because, although the crippling injuries which Snape sustained in _Missing in Action_ might well be beyond the powers of the wizarding world to correct, I knew that in a good Muggle Intensive Care Unit he would have at least some chance of survival.

Eventually, in an effort to work off the obsession, I began doodling a sort of sequel to _Missing in Action_, and then other people started to get interested and we decided to turn it into a proper fic. Writing a story which is inspired by but slightly AU from another fanfic may be unusual - but it's only doing the same as we're all doing to JK Rowling's story.

The story starts off immensely grim - it could hardly do otherwise - but will eventually become quite hopeful and light-hearted. It is, overall, about kindness rather than cruelty, and recovery rather than injury. It also answers a question which is raised in my story-sequence _Mood Music_ and _Sons of Prophecy_, in which an OC is trying to provide support to a Snape who has escaped from Voldemort's clutches traumatized but still functional, and who asks her what she would have done with him if he had been completely broken, rather than just very badly shaken. She says she'd do much the same as she is doing, except that it would take longer. But it occurred to me, writing _Lost and Found_, that in some ways it might even be easier to rebuild him from the ground up, since at least then he might shut up and stop arguing for a few weeks - rather like the difference between doing a clean reinstall on an operating system, and trying to repair it whilst it's still running.

Note that _Missing in Action_ was written before the publication of _The Half-Blood Prince_, and the whole sequence is therefore AU. We have tried, however, to make _Lost and Found_ compatible with the background revealed in HBP (and later with DH). The story follows canon closely, therefore, except that it diverges from JKR's time-line at the end of OotP. Fewer Death Eaters were captured following the battle at the Ministry than in canon. Lucius in particular is still free, and as a result Draco was not forced to take the Dark Mark that summer, and the incident of the Unbreakable Vow never happened.

In _Missing in Action_, the _Daily Prophet_ reported that Snape had disappeared following a raid on the school, and said that this was four years after Voldemort's return, that Harry had graduated "last year" and that Snape's role as a spy had been revealed also "last year." Harry should have finished school in 1998, so this would set the action in 1999. That would indeed be four years after Voldemort's return to full human (ish) life at the end of _Goblet of Fire_, which was in 1995, and if Harry is no longer a student that explains him calling Dumbledore "Albus" in the story.

However, given all the progress Dumbledore makes with uncovering Horcruxes etc. during HBP, it seems unlikely that Voldemort would still be in such a position of power by summer 1999, and also for plot-purposes we wanted to have Harry and co. still at school when Snape's fate is discovered, and it would be stretching credulity to have them all have stayed on after NEWTs.

So for our own purposes we're assuming that the _Daily Prophet_ accused Snape of being a Death Eater soon after the Ministry battle in summer 1996, when ex-Minister Fudge told one of their reporters about Snape showing him the Dark Mark. To prevent the Board of Governors from demanding Snape's resignation, Dumbledore countered this by saying publicly that Snape was his agent. This did not of itself end his career as a spy, since Voldemort has known all along that Dumbledore _thinks_ Snape is his agent - he just thinks he's wrong. But it inflamed Bellatrix's suspicions and caused her to go digging. Snape stayed on as Potions master (since there was no reason to think he would be leaving in a year), and the raid during which he disappeared occurred in summer 1997, in place of the "Flight of the Prince" episode and a few days after he had successfully treated Albus for poisoning following the pendant-Horcrux incident.

In saying that Voldemort returned four years ago, the _Prophet_ is thinking of his return to independent if only semi-human form, which occurred some time between 1992 and 1994, and it is vaguely assuming Snape collaborated with Pettigrew in getting him back to Britain. And the _Prophet_ is simply wrong about Harry finishing school, having confused his OWLs with his NEWTs. It is not, after all, a paper known for great accuracy.

Because Draco did not take the Dark Mark in the summer between 5th and 6th years, there was no accidental poisoning of Ron, and therefore no sudden, warm reconciliation between him and Hermione. He has split from Lavender and he and Hermione are getting along OK-ish, but they aren't really dating.

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Credits:

The first few chapters of _Lost and Found_ were written mainly by me, **whitehound**, although including input from **aloe** and **Dyce** and from **cecelle**, whose help with the medical bits was invaluable. **Cecelle** and **aloe** also contributed to some of the later chapters.

Starting from chapter five, the story was written collaboratively between myself and **Dyce**, with **Dyce** writing the great majority of Hermione's dialogue and also some of Snape's scenes, and also doing most of Harry and Draco. The long Snape/Hermione dialogues in later chapters were written like an extempore play, with **whitehound** doing Snape's voice and **Dyce** doing Hermione, and then just letting the characters talk to each other and seeing where it took us.

**N.B.** I have a habit of using punctuation partly as musical notation, to control the rhythm of a sentence and thereby to indicate inflection of both speech and thought. This means basically that I omit commas after quotes, in cases where I feel that the dip in emphasis caused by the comma would spoil the music of the line, and sometimes insert commas where I think that the speaker/thinker would pause slightly, even if a comma isn't grammatically necessary at that point. This is not an error, this is a known literary style called "aural punctuation" - so please don't bug me about it.


	2. The story so far

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

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**THE STORY SO FAR**

Because this is going to be a long story which may not be updated very regularly, this page provides summaries of all chapters prior to the most recent one. It is intended for people who have already been reading the story but have forgotten where they had got to.

**DO NOT READ IT IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY READ THE STORY**, as of course it is all spoilers.

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**Missing in Action** (by **Sheriff of Nottingham**)

Some time subsequent to the Ministry battle at the end of OotP, the _Daily Prophet_ published a story claiming that Snape was a Death Eater, and Dumbledore defended him, stating publicly that Snape was his agent (which would not in itself necessarily prevent Snape from continuing to spy on Voldemort, since Voldemort knows that Dumbledore _thinks_ Snape is his agent, but it would arouse the suspicions of Snape's fellow Death Eaters). During a raid on Hogwarts by Death Eaters Snape disappears, and the _Prophet_ takes this as proof that it had been right all along, and claims that Snape had master-minded the raid and then gone back to his true master. Harry is convinced that the _Prophet_ is right but Dumbledore tells him angrily that when Lupin dropped out of sight for a while he didn't assume that Lupin had betrayed the Order, and if he wouldn't think it of Lupin he shouldn't think it of Snape.

Four months later, Snape's barely-living body is dumped in one of the Potions store-rooms to await discovery, burned with acid, missing his left arm and leg and his right leg below the knee, with the corners of his mouth slit right back to the jaw and his belly sliced open and breeding maggots. He has been silenced so that he could not scream or call for help, and has probably been lying there for a day or more. He is so weak and dazed with pain that the students and substitute-teacher who find him think they've found his mutilated corpse, and at first even Madam Pomfrey isn't sure he's still alive.

During his captivity he has been starved to the point of death and forced to remain awake and aware the whole time, and a gloating letter from Voldemort reveals that he has also been the sexual plaything of most of the Death Eaters (and also claims, in passing, that Snape had been Sirius's lover and had had to cope with his grief all alone). He has been magically-bound so that he can't be healed and no pain-killers will work on him, and so that he will remain alive no matter what is done to him - although the latter curse is wearing off. Much to Harry's horror and guilt, Pomfrey and Dumbledore can do nothing for Snape except keep him company, even though he is far too stunned by pain to appreciate it, and wait for him to die.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Chapter 1: A Doctor in the House**

Harry, horrified by Snape's injuries, suggests that even if magical healing can't help him there might be Muggle methods that could, and that Hermione would know more about this (because her parents are both dentists). Hermione suggests calling in her future brother-in-law, a young trainee surgeon from Newcastle, called Adrian, who should at least know if it is possible to help Snape, and who (as a family member of a Muggle-born witch) would not have to be Obliviated afterwards.

Adrian draws up a list of medical supplies which he will need and Rosmerta, Lupin and Tonks are sent off to get them. As Snape is in appalling pain and racked by convulsions, and it will take about half an hour for the supplies to arrive, Adrian asks Hermione if any of the students at Hogwarts are taking heroin and gets an answer in the affirmative. But even heroin does nothing to reduce Snape's agony - it seems that Voldemort's spell which prevents Snape from being healed or comforted applies to Muggle medicines as well, which means that even the pain-killers which are being fetched from the hospital wouldn't work.

In desperation, Adrian asks Poppy Pomfrey if she would be able to heal a broken back, and when she says that she would he gets her to cut Snape's spinal cord, preventing him from feeling anything below chest-height. That still leaves him aware of an extensive area of burning and the injuries to his face but he can no longer feel the gut wound, which had been the main source of his agony.

While all this is going on, Hermione suggests that since the touch of a unicorn's horn traditionally is able to clean poisons out of any container of liquid, it might be used to clean infection-toxins out of Snape's bloodstream. While Hermione herself is otherwise engaged, trying to find out the correct dosage for heroin, Harry admits to being the only virgin in the room and is sent off to help Hagrid summon a unicorn, and Bill Weasley is called in to see if he can break the curses preventing Snape from being healed.

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**Chapter 2: Emergency Ward 9¾**

Once the medical supplies arrive Adrian is able to get Snape on a drip, which will help to rehydrate and feed him, combat the infection in his wounds with antibiotics etc.. But Snape's condition is very precarious. He is so dehydrated that he has gone into partial renal failure. Worse, the effort of combating the burns is putting a huge demand on his system, he is already desperately thin and the gut-wound means that Adrian is unable to feed him other than through the drip. Since Snape can no longer feel it Adrian actually prefers to leave the gut-wound open for a day or two to allow the maggots to continue their work of snipping away any necrosed tissue, since that means the wound will heal much cleaner and faster once it is stitched.

Adrian dresses Snape's burns with Muggle wound-dressings, which at least makes him a lot more comfortable, and when Harry returns they take Snape to see the unicorn, cut a vein in his remaining thigh (which he can no longer feel) and get the unicorn to dip his horn into the cut. This does cleanse Snape's system of toxins and also reduces the build-up of sodium and potassium in his blood. He is still very sick, but when the spell which is forcing him to stay alive wears off he does somehow keep on breathing, as he has been ordered to do by McGonagall - even though he is still too stunned by pain and horror and exhaustion really to recognize her.

He is however capable of recognizing the difference between calmness and cruelty. Adrian's soothing, singsong Geordie accent seems to steady him, and Hermione is able to groom the mats out of his hair (with a special mat-splitting tool she normally uses on Crookshanks) and to wash it without panicking him.

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**Chapter 3: Speaking in Tongues **

The following morning, Adrian calls in sick to the hospital where he works, so that he will be able to stay with Snape round the clock until he is either stable or dead. Snape is calmer and more comfortable than on the previous night but he is becoming weaker due to the burns, his lungs are filling up with fluid and he requires extra oxygen to help him breath - especially after Molly Weasley Floos in to fuss over him and Ron bounds up to her so suddenly and loudly that he literally frightens Snape into convulsions.

Adrian and Poppy perform interim repairs on Snape's gashed mouth, and with assistance from McGonagall they work out a way of using the unicorn effect that doesn't involve cutting Snape again for every session, but really all they can do is try to keep his condition from deteriorating any faster as they wait for Bill Weasley and Filius Flitwick to find some way of breaking the curses.

On the second day after Snape's return, Adrian decides that the gut-wound is ready for surgery - a complex process which takes all afternoon. Bill and Filius realize that part of the hex-matrix has to be undone in Parseltongue, and with Harry's help they are able to break the curses, enabling Snape to lose consciousness, to be heard and to be healed. Poppy begins the healing-process on the surgical incisions and on the burns, and she and Adrian repair Snape's face as he drifts off to sleep.

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**Chapter 4: Waking Dreams **

Having been freed from the curse which had forced him to stay awake for four months, Snape sleeps for five days solid, and has to be fed through a naso-gastric tube. Although he is still very weak and frail, now that Poppy Pomfrey is able to perform healing magic on him his condition improves steadily, and when he awakes he is much more alert and aware of his surroundings.

This is a mixed blessing, as it means that he is much more easily scared, and he also begins to suffer from raving, screaming nightmares. Only Adrian and Hermione are able to do much with him without frightening him into fits. Now that he is able to eat, at least a little, Adrian brings him wine which he does appreciate, so Hermione suggests surrounding him with pleasant stimuli - music, scented oils etc. - to coax him out of his confused state. This is working quite well until a Quidditch player is brought into the infirmary with serious injuries, and the smell of blood sends Snape straight back into blind, mindless panic.

Now that he is fairly medically stable he is moved back down to his own quarters, in the hopes that this will prove to be a more relaxing environment, but he is still very badly shaken. However, Minerva McGonagall finally manages to get through to him and get him to recognize her, and he collapses weeping in her arms and tells her that he doesn't know whether she is real or not, because Voldemort had tormented him with false images of her and of Albus Dumbledore.

Now that Snape is medically stable and showing signs of still having a coherent mind, however traumatized, Dumbledore stands up at the Hallowe'en Feast and tells the school for the first time that what they had found, seventeen days beforehand, was Snape's living body - not his corpse.

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**Chapter 5: Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make**

As soon as the school knows that Snape is alive but very sick, Neville and Luna both volunteer to help look after him: Neville because he has experience of dealing with his own parents and knows how to behave around people traumatized by torture, and Luna just on a whim. Luna appoints herself as Snape's reader, and being read to does seem to help him.

A party of Slytherins, led by Pansy Parkinson and Gregory Goyle, decide to guard Snape's quarters in case of further attacks on him, and are highly suspicious of Hermione turning up on her way to visit. They march her in to see Snape in order to get proof that she does have his permission to be there, and are horrified by his poor condition.

He is still drifting in and out of focus but his episodes of lucidity are getting longer, and he actually surfaces enough to make a catty remark about Lupin. He talks to Dumbledore, fairly coherently, and asks that the walls should be covered with tapestries, so he doesn't have to wake up surrounded by bare stone which looks like a cell. Very embarrassed, he also tells Dumbledore that it helps him to focus and remember that he is free if somebody holds him all the time.

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**Chapter 6: Holding On**

Being held does help Snape to remain focussed but he is horribly ashamed of what he sees as his own weakness, and is still very frail. There is some doubt as to whether it is suitable for Hermione, Neville and Luna to hold him through the night but Luna points out that they are all of age, and have already been doing so unofficially in any case.

Now that he is reasonably coherent most of the time, Snape is provided with a new wand: a highly emotional moment, even though he is too weak as yet really to use it. Angry at what he perceives as his own weakness, he snarls and snaps and thinks it would have been better if he had died.

As his mind becomes more coherent so do his memories, and he starts to have specific flashbacks and dreams of what the Death Eaters did to him. Minerva comforts him through a violent nightmare by turning into a cat.

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**Chapter 7: Sleeptalking **

It is nearly two months on from his traumatic return to Hogwarts, and Snape is now well enough to start being a bit snappy, to feed himself and to discuss a temporary replacement for the job of Potions master. Dumbledore is thinking of asking Horace Slughorn.

Snape now has the energy and concentration to talk to people coherently, and he and Adrian are beginning to be friends rather than just doctor/patient. When Lupin visits to see how he is, they have a conversation which reveals that Snape had lied to Voldemort about being in a relationship with Sirius, in order to explain his having alerted the Order to the fight at the Ministry.

Early in December Snape suffers a particularly bad flashback during the night, which leaves him uncertain as to what is a dream and what is real. In an effort to anchor him, Hermione gets him talking about Arithmancy, and as she listens to him, confident and sure in his subject, she realizes to her horror that she is in love with him.

A sudden appearance by Dobby finally convinces Snape that this is the real reality and he truly is safely back at Hogwarts - since he would be unlikely to hallucinate anything quite so bizarre. Dobby's appearance is so very sudden (and bizarre) that it makes Snape yelp, and Hermione charges out of the bathroom to rescue him, clad only in a towel - to her great chagrin and his great amusement.

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**Chapter 8: What Hermione Did Next**

Hermione is mortified both by having a crush on Snape and at having been seen nearly naked; he on the other hand is still secretly rather amused.

Flitwick begins measuring Snape for prosthetic limbs, which should be a hopeful development, and he begins doing a little light potion-making again; but the thought of his own disability and (as he sees it) uselessness, and the knowledge of the fate Lucius and Peter had had planned for him to mark the approaching Christmas holiday, prey on his mind until he becomes distraught. Hermione is very upset about her own inability to help him much.

Snape is simultaneously touched and unnerved to receive proper presents, and to be both host and honoured guest at a Christmas get-together in his quarters. A chance remark reminds him too vividly that the Death Eaters had intended to give him to Albus as a Christmas present, limbless and blinded, and he freaks out badly; but is reassured to realize that even in that _extremis_ there would have been help and care waiting for him.

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**Chapter 9: Matters Arising**

Horace Slughorn is appointed as temporary Potions master, and we learn that the real Mad-Eye Moody is teaching DADA. Snape has very good reason to be wary of him.

The six carers mark Snape's thirty-eighth birthday with a variety of odd gifts. He is amazed and touched, and actually feels quite hopeful; but before long he is back to having raging nightmares again. Neville settles him after one such bad dream by talking about his theories about magical plants, and Snape is surprized to realize that the boy has an actual brain.

Now that he is stronger, Snape is frustrated by his own inaction, and becomes depressed about his injuries. Adrian assures him that it is still possible to lead a full life, and Poppy uses massage to ease his tension.

Snape is now so much fitter and more relaxed that he wakes up next to Hermione with an early-morning erection - to his profound embarrassment. This leads on to a cautious and oblique bit of mutual flirting.

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**Chapter 10: Secret Admirers**

Snape is on the whole improving, but still suffers from random flashbacks. Filius has started fitting him for a prototype prosthetic arm, although he finds the experience rather disturbing. He ends up having a violent flashback about being made to drink contaminated water; Neville and Luna support him through it, and share a moment of understanding.

Snape is unsure of how to behave around Hermione, now, and concentrates on helping her with her studies instead of discussing any more personal matters. However, when he is disturbed by the realization that he has now been free for as long as he was a prisoner, he allows Hermione to comfort him. She, meantime, feels that she is becoming as soppily romantic and mushy as Lavender - although she is determined to hide her feelings from Snape himself.

Neville precipitates matters by telling Snape that Hermione fancies him. Hermione had admitted that she sometimes found sharing a bed with him a turn-on, but Snape is sure Neville is wrong and that she was just turned on by the proximity of an adult male, not by him personally. But he is intrigued enough by Neville's suggestion to ask her about it. Hermione admits that she does find him personally attractive, and they have a cautious, teasing conversation about what anyone might find attractive in him; about the pleasure of finding someone one can really talk to without having to keep stopping to explain the long words; and about how clever Neville is, on the quiet.

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**Chapter 11: As Others See Us**

Snape uses emotional blackmail to get Horace Slughorn to give Albus the Horcrux memory, by stressing the fact that he is, and will continue to be, in danger of being re-captured and tortured again until such time as Voldemort is finally defeated. In return, Snape helps Slughorn by resuming some of his pastoral duties as Head of House. As he becomes healthier so he becomes more frustrated and restless, and he is beginning to be obsessed with the knowledge that his captors were able to reduce him to a crawling, mindless state.

We learn that Harry has been studying Potions with a private tutor in Hogsmeade, since Snape wouldn't let him join his class with less than an 'O' at OWL level, but Slughorn has now incorporated Harry into his class and is finding him to be an excellent student.

Snape realizes that he is coming to see his student carers as actual friends. He learns how abusive Neville's home-life was as a small child (uncles trying to squeeze more magic out of him by threatening to kill him etc.), and offers to help Neville submit his botanical theories for publication.

Flitwick is working on the prosthetic limbs for Snape, but the project is not going very well, mainly because Snape's muscles are so wasted.

Snape and Hermione talk about the possibility of a relationship, and the age-gap between them. To convince Snape of her sincerity, and to show him a view of himself which is much better and more forgiving than his own, Hermione persuades Snape to use Legilimency on her and then look at himself through her eyes. He is horribly disturbed by seeing himself from the outside as he was when he was found, mutilated and dying, but also puzzled and touched by her admiration for him.

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Chapter 12: Time Goes By

Snape continues to practise with the prostheses, but acquiring any sort of control or steadiness is a slow and frustrating job and he and Adrian get rather scratchy with each other, especially as Adrian is a bit frazzled over plans for his forthcoming wedding to Hermione's half-sister.

Now that he has seen his injuries from the outside, through Hermione's eyes, Snape feels better able to tackle some of his own memories and he and Albus make a second and more successful attempt to extract and analyse his memories of being smuggled into the castle by boat. Seeing himself injured and mishandled is deeply distressing but they learn that he was brought in by the recent school-leaver Cormac McLaggen (who Snape thinks is just the type to become a Death Eater) and by two female associates of McLaggen's, although Snape's memory is still too confused and blurred to be able to identify them.

Snape is very stressed and guilty about the fact that he broke under torture and told Voldemort how much Albus knew about the prophecy and the Horcruxes (which at that time, in this time-line, did _not_ include Slughorn's memory of how many Horcruxes there were). But Albus tells him not to concern himself with the war, which he and Harry have well in hand, but to rest and be a little frivolous for once. Snape does attempt to comply, by fooling around with the strange gadget for measuring Useless Statistics which Albus gave him for his birthday.

As he promised, Snape has been thinking about Hermione's offer to him, and he finally suggests that they should attempt at least the beginnings of a physical relationship, provided it is understood that it is only a test at this stage. They kiss, cautiously on his part and also rather clumsily, due to his injuries; but despite these initial difficulties they both consider it a resounding success.

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**Chapter 13: Language and Literature **

Neville's article on magical botany, which Snape helped him to submit, is accepted by a learned journal. Meanwhile, off-stage, Albus and Harry are going Horcrux hunting. Snape is concerned about the danger inherent in denaturing a Horcrux, but Albus has got Slughorn to brew Felix felicis.

Snape is still very unsteady on his (prosthetic) feet, but has progressed to being given exercises by Madam Hooch. He is still badly shaken by having seen one of his own torture-memories in the Pensieve, which has stirred up other very unpleasant recollections - but also some rather pleasant ones, to do with being nursed when he was first brought back to Hogwarts. Adrian, meanwhile, is preparing for his imminent wedding, and very stressed.

Snape keeps his half-promise, made before Christmas, to teach Hermione to swear - although he rather wishes he hadn't. Hagrid meanwhile keeps his promise to talk to the giant squid - who confirms that the two girls who assisted McLaggen in boating Snape into the castle were current students.

Snape and Hermione have progressed to more enthusiastic, sexually-charged kissing. After she helps him through a nightmare, they talk about his attempts to comfort his Slytherins, about his family and origins, and then about the attitude of wizards to the Muggle world. They agree to wear each other's ribbon favours in public, if and when they go public about their relationship, and discuss showing each other off to envious rivals, and why Hermione doesn't seem to have many boys after her.

Hermione shows Snape the sonnet she wrote about him in the autumn. This leads to a rather grim conversation about getting emotionally stressful events into words, and Snape's experience of seeing his own flesh and bone eaten by Fenrir Greyback.

Snape talks again about his relationship with his Slytherins, and why he needs to be biased in their favour to counteract all the bias against them. This starts them both thinking about doing something about the position of abused or neglected wizarding children - a possible joint project for After the War.

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**Chapter 14: Enter the Dragon **

Snape is waiting rather fretfully for Hermione to return from Adrian and Imogen's wedding, when he hears raised voices in the corridor outside. For a moment he thinks it is Lucius in the doorway, and nearly shoots him, but it is Draco, who has been rescued form Death Eater guards after being spotted by the Order at the same hotel Hermione was staying at.

Draco knew that Snape had been captured and tortured, but Lucius promised him that he would make sure it was all over quite quickly. If he had known that Lucius had lied to him, and that Snape was being kept alive and in agony, he would have tried to save him; but he was kept isolated, ostensibly for his own protection, and had not even known that Snape had been returned alive to Hogwarts. In fact, Lucius didn't want him to find out what had happened to Snape until after he had taken the Dark Mark - which in this time-line he has not yet done, since Lucius is not in Azkaban - and it was too late to back out. When Hermione told Draco even the bare gist of what had been done to Snape he was sick and furious and declared his allegiance to Dumbledore - who used Legilimency to confirm his sincerity.

Overcome with emotion, Draco goes to give Snape a hug, rather too suddenly and without warning, and Snape freaks out badly. This leads to Draco discovering that Snape was sexually assaulted - about which he is bitterly angry.

Draco tells Snape that Hermione only played a minor role in his rescue and that she is fine, so Snape is startled and horrified when he sees that in fact she has been injured and is limping badly. He is angry and concerned about her taking such a risk, and insists that when he has got the hang of the prostheses, and is properly on his feet again, he will coach her in Defence. They discuss Dementors, and the way in which even good memories can be undermined. This leads on to a lengthy discussion about Dumbledore's Army, and about Snape's and Harry's mutual hostility.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- **

**Chapter 15: Crawl Before You Can Walk **

Hermione emotionally blackmails Harry into agreeing in principle to apologise to Snape for looking into his Pensieve. Draco rather awkwardly thanks both Harry and Hermione for saving his godfather.

Draco's return has stirred up Snape's bad memories, and he has a major freak-out at Neville. They discuss father-figures, and the satisfaction which Neville derives from being able to help Snape. Neville offers to make Snape a herbal remedy to soothe his raw nerves.

Snape is, in general, improving, and no longer needs to be held all the time. He is concerned because they still do not know the identity of the two girl students who helped to bring him into the castle and dump him in the storeroom. It is suspected that the one who spoke was a Ravenclaw, but Filius Flitwick is away at present.

Draco is to take over most of Poppy Pomfrey's shifts with Snape, about which she is rather sad. She tries to persuade Snape to use mental techniques to control his nightmares, but he half thinks he deserves them. He is however getting better with the prostheses and is actually walking, albeit very slowly and stiffly.

He is also giving Hermione private Defence Against the Dark Arts tuition. He discovers in conversation with Hermione that Harry has got hold of the Half-Blood Prince's book, and is initially afraid of what Hermione will think of the boy in the book. They discuss text-books in general, and intellectual risk-taking, and make plans for Snape's first venture outside.

Snape is very aware of the way that his desire for Hermione is hampered by ingrained terror of physical intimacy, and knows that if their relationship is to progress he needs to overcome this. They experiment with lying bare-chested, skin to skin, and just cuddling and talking. He is still puzzled by the extent of her affection, so she opens her mind to him and encourages him to used Legilimency to see her regard for him.

They discuss the moral complexities of Snape's past and his feeling that he deserves puinishment. He is ashamed of having been broken down into such an abject condition, but Hermione chivvies him out of his self-disgust and makes him feel that his situation is manageable. They discuss mutual support, and he promises her that he won't kill himself, and tells her that despite everything which has happened to him he is less bitter now than he was before, because at least now some good things have happened to him, as well as the bad.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Chapter 16: Voice Recognition **

Luna insists on seeing the copy of Snape's Pensieved memory of being brought into the castle by boat, in order to identify the voice of the girl who spoke - who is assumed to be a Ravenclaw, since the Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Gryffindor house masters do not recognize her voice, and Filius Flitwick is away on Order business. After viewing the memory, Luna believes the voice to be Padma Patil's. Albus decides to leave Padma free for the moment in order that she may be watched to see whom she contacts: he tells Snape not to tell Hermione or Neville that Padma is probably one of the culprits, as he does not think they would be able to act convincingly normally around Padma's Gryffindor twin.

Neville tells Adrian that Snape has bouts of feeling that his skin is dirty, which Adrian believes may be a symptom of neurological damage rather than neurosis. Adrian reassures Snape that his friends won't abandon him once he is no longer sick enough to be dependant on them, and that he himself has some very fine pubs he wishes to introduce Snape to once he can walk properly. Snape is making some progress in that regard: he manages to lurch three unsteady lengths of the room, and to wear the prosthetic arm for three hours before it starts getting on his nerves too much.

Harry apologizes over the Pensieve incident in fifth year, and Snape drops the bombshell about the identity of the Half-Blood Prince. He and Harry reach some sort of awkward accommodation where they can at least be reasonably civil to each other, and Harry plays cards with Snape and Hermione - though he still wouldn't want to be left alone with Snape.

Draco has heard rumours that it was McLaggen and two current students who conveyed Snape in, and swears horrible vengeance on them. Horace Slughorn is dumping a lot of Potions work on Snape, but his motives are not simply self-interested; he also feels that it does Snape good to feel needed, and to have something he can complain about without feeling unmanly for minding it.

Meantime, Snape is beginning really to appreciate the pleasures of the present, even if he is still disturbed by the pains of the past. He is becoming accustomed to lying skin to skin with Hermione, and he is beginning to recall what happened when he was first found and treated and to find comfort in remembering everyone's kindness to him, especially Hermione's. He is also trying, with moderate success, to teach her Occlumency.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Chapter 17: The Name of the Rose **

The school schedules an extra Hogsmeade visit to get most of the students out of the way, and while the coast is clear Snape is carried out to one of the greenhouses, accompanied by Neville, Hermione and Draco and a party of Slytherin guards. Snape and Hermione have exchanged coloured ribbons, like Mediaeval favours. Draco, Neville and Hermione have all been given permission to go out in the grounds not wearing school robes, to make the occasion seem pleasingly informal; rather than wearing Muggle clothes, but wishing to look as unlike his father as possible, Draco has borrowed Ron's dreadful old dress robes. On him, they look quite good.

_En route_ to the greenhouse, Pansy Parkinson notices that Hermione is holding Snape's hand to reassure him. The Slytherins take up stations outside, and Snape and his two young friends sit on old-fashioned garden furniture in the greenhouse, drinking tea and later eating a sort of informal high tea provided by the house elves. The setting is so pleasant that Snape finds himself feeling quite relaxed and hopeful, and realizes for the first time that he really does expect to get better. They discuss the ethics of animate to inanimate Transfiguration, and Animagi, and the house-elves' contract, and pure-blood attitudes, and catching Pettigrew to find out how his silver hand was made, and holidays, and nightmares, and keeping his relationship with Hermione out of the papers. A very pleasant and relaxing time is had by all, and Snape even sings a snatch of verse about a rose, although his voice is permanently damaged.

Afterwards, Pansy corners Hermione and gets her to admit that she and Snape are interested in each other. The two girls reach an uneasy truce; they don't like each other, but they both want what's best for Snape. Pansy warns Hermione that there is a lot of unrest in Slytherin between the pro-Snape and pro-Voldemort factions; neither of them really wants to worry Snape, but they conclude that he ought to be told.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Chapter 18: Treacherous Footing**

Fearing that he will find out from Pansy anyway, Snape tells Draco about the nature of his relationship with Hermione. Draco is a lot more _blasé_ about it than he had expected. They discuss Slytherin politics, and the complex reassorting of loyalties and alliances which is going on within Slytherin now they know that loyalty to Snape and loyalty to the Dark Lord are incompatible.

Snape speaks to some of his Slytherin guards about the situation, testing the waters preparatory to holding a full house meeting. During this conversation, Snape recognizes Daphne Greengrass's laugh and realizes that she was one of the junior Death Eater wannabees who brought him into Hogwarts when he was maimed. Daphne realizes that he has made the connection and she tries to kill him, but Neville rugby-tackles her and the guards then overpower her.

In his fury and excitement Snape manages to leave his rooms, with the prosthetics and assistance from some of the loyal guard, to haul Daphne up to the Headmaster's office - although he collapses halfway and has to be transported the rest of the way by Dumbledore. An emergency committee including Tonks and Moody interrogate Daphne and the Patil twins, and Tonks tricks Daphne and Padma into admitting their involvement with McLaggen, and therefore their guilt. Padma admits that she was drawn to Voldemort because she was tired of being a good girl just like her twin, and that she hadn't worried about how much Snape was suffering because he didn't look human any more.

Snape is traumatized by this and has a crisis of nerve, but he is chivvied out of it fairly fast, assisted by Minerva and the Baron. Neville later admits, at an impromptu case conference, that when Snape becomes overwrought he sometimes distracts him from it by allowing Trevor the toad to "escape" into the bed.

Later Snape has a dream which is actually full of hope and promise. In the wake of this he agrees to teach Harry how to make his own wine, and the same recklessness which had driven him out of his rooms and up the stairs to the Headmaster's office leads him to progress to some fairly serious sexual experimentation with Hermione.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Chapter 19: A Thousand Dreams Which Would Awake Me**

In response to the discovery that Daphne Greengrass, one of Snape's guards, was really an enemy, the Slytherins enact a ritual whereby those who are well-intentioned towards Snape swear an oath (ranging from life-long fealty to benign neutrality, according to individual taste) and receive a magical tattoo of a hound, which will vanish if they break their word. Snape attends the full council of Slytherin house - on foot - and confronts the faction who are still loyal to Voldemort.

Later he suffers a violent nightmare from which Hermione is unable to rouse him, and he has to be sedated by Poppy. When he wakes Hermione is distressed by her inability to help him, and he tells her how much she has done and continues to do for him.

He admits to her that he was seduced and then abused by Lucius at school, when he was twelve. They discuss how it would have been had he and Hermione actually been at school together, and this leads them to consider the possibility of Hermione taking Severus to meet her parents.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Chapter 20: In _Loco Parentis_ **

Hermione and Severus experiment with various forms of foreplay in which he generally lets her take the lead, fearing to feel as if he is taking advantage of her. He is distressed by the oath of fealty which so many of his Slytherins have taken for him, and by the thought of Daphne Greengrass, one of his own house-students for whom he is responsible, ending up in Azkaban for life.

Adrian is very impressed that Severus is walking so well, and organises a celebratory picnic lunch. They end up under the beech tree by the lake, where the Maruaders had attacke Severus and he had quarrelled with Lily. He has a rant about having been bullied ragged, and the others reassure him that now he has a circle of reliable friends.

With Hermione and Draco for company, Severus attends an Easter midnight service in the castle chapel, and has a spiritual experience which reassures him that he has not been cut off from grace. He makes progress with teaching Harry to brew beer and wine.

Minerva McGonagall corners Hermione and asks her what is going on between her and Severus. Hermione admits to the early stages of a sexual relationship and Minerva - who was rather a racy young woman in her day - is far more amused than annoyed, but she seeks reassurance that neither of them is inadvertently taking advantage of the other, and that Hermione won't hurt Severus by losing interest in him. Hermione tells Severus about this and he is touched by Minerva's motherly concern. They agree that their relationship now has the equivalent of tenure, although Severus has to warn Hermione not to keep touching him too restlessly without warning, as it makes him feel crowded.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Chapter 21: Games of Skill and Chance**

Over the Easter break, Severus begins to sit outside on a regular basis, to read or work, and he is back to brewing for the hospital wing. He realizes that dealing with his trauma is no longer the main issue in his life. One of the issues which is now preoccupying him is whether, when and how to tell Albus about his relationship with Hermione.

Harry and Severus play cards, and Harry asks if they can resume Occlumency lessons. Poppy asks if she and Adrian may write a paper about Severus's medical treatment, and he says that if he agrees, he will co-write it.

Severus gives Hermione a sonnet which he has written about her, and they discuss the nature of their relationship and of romance, and engage in some intense off-camera foreplay. He tells her that she mustn't expect always to be able to help him, and mustn't feel bad about it, because what she does for him is more than enough.

They discuss what it would have meant for their relationship if he had never been taken and tortured, and Hermione had revealed her feelings for him while he was still teaching her; and conversely what would have happened if he had been returned to Hogwarts much more maimed than he was. They also discuss how they will continue their relationship after Hermione leaves school, and their long-term career plans, and the art of teaching, and the correct male response to new female hairdos. They make a date for Hermione to lose her virginity at Beltane, and Severus reassures her about her attractiveness.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Chapter 22: Guilt-Edged Bonds**

Severus decides to tell Albus about his relationship with Hermione. Albus is less than thrilled, and attempts to be manipulative, but is too concerned about Severus's still quite fragile state to be really angry, especially as the relationship had been OK'd by Minerva. He does attempt to be angry with Minerva about it, but it doesn't work.

Severus has equally difficult conversations with Parvati about her sister's behaviour, and with Moody about his security arrangements. Moody and Lupin are thinking of duplicating the Marauder's Map to use as a surveillance device, now that Severus is often out of his quarters and walking around the school and grounds. Although Severus is walking much better, he misses his footing at the head of some stairs and has a bad fall, which triggers a sudden fit of desperate rage and grief over the loss of his left hand and feet. Adrian soothes him, and he in turn soothes Hermione, who is panicking about her NEWTs.

Occlumency lessons with Harry are resumed. Harry is thinking of using his connection with Voldemort to feed him false information.

Hermione and Severus are both filled with nervous but pleasurable anticipation of their arrangements for Beltane, although Severus still half thinks Hermione is making a mistake. To reassure him, Hermione gives him a Valentine which she had originally written for him in February. They talk about what it would have been like if they had been teenagers at the same time. This leads on to him admitting that it was he who repeated the prophecy to Voldemort and caused the Potters' deaths. Hermione is shocked, yet accepting.

They talk about Horcruxes, and possible ways of binding the piece of soul which is still in Voldemort. Mention of Voldemort's age leads them into a discussion about growing old together, and how desirable they find each other, which leaves Severus feeling more accepting of his own body - however damaged.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Chapter 23: M'aidez**

On Beltane night, Hermione and Severus make love fully for the first time. Hermione is a virgin and bleeds a little, and initially the smell of blood in a sexual context causes Severus to have a spectacular flashback/freakout, but he breaks free of it when he sees that Hermione is upset. Their second attempt at lovemaking goes much better, and Hermione is extremely impressd - the more so because he is keen to try again as soon as possible. He is left feeling much more relaxed about sexual matters, including about the abuse which he suffered as a prisoner.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Chapter 24: Intromission**

Single-scene chapter showing Severus and Hermione the morning after they make love fully for the first time, and how happy they both are, despite the burden of Severus's memories.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**


	3. 01 A Doctor in the House

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**1: A DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE**

As Harry gripped Voldemort's letter in a shaking hand, the door of the infirmary clicked open behind him and Professor McGonagall hurried in, almost running. When she saw Snape her already grey face turned deadly white and she clutched at the end of the bed for support. Harry remembered then that she herself was not yet fully recovered from her injuries sustained during the Death Eater raid at the end of the previous year.

"Is he - "

"No, Minerva" Dumbledore said sadly; "not yet. But yes, he is - dying."

"Then why are you just - standing there? There must be something you can do. St Mungo's - "

Poppy Pomfrey shook her head, unshed tears standing in her eyes like stars. "Trying to Apparate or Floo him, it would just hurt him - a Portkey would be worse, with his stomach cut... And I know enough to know there's nothing St Mungo's could do anyway. Look at this." She showed McGonagall something with her wand which Harry couldn't see clearly from where he was standing, but it looked as if a diagnostic spell was causing writing to appear on a parchment. "You can see, he's been curse-bound so that none of our healing spells or potions will work on him, not even phoenix tears - curse-bound so he can neither die nor lose consciousness. I can't stop the pain for him, I can't knock him out - I can't even finish him. His soul would still cling to his body."

As if on cue, the maimed wreckage lying sprawled across the bed drew a ragged, shuddering breath. Harry backed away in dry-mouthed horror, until he could feel the door-frame pressing against his back. "I thought you said - he was dying."

"He is," said McGonagall, tight-lipped and grey. "According to this, the spells which are keeping him bound to his body are wearing out. He'll be dead in a few hours."

"But - can't you lift the curses? Can't you - heal him?"

"Harry, please believe me," Madam Pomfrey said, shaking her head. "If there was anything we could do - but even if we could lift the curses, he has injuries there are no spells for. Old injuries, injuries left to rot - that never normally happens in the wizarding world, normally any injury is fixed soon after it occurs, so we have no spells for this... His body is filled with poisons from the infection - once the curses stop forcing him to live he'll die in a few hours and there's nothing I can do to stop it. I can't even feed him - he's so starved and thirsty and I can't even feed him because his stomach is so shrunken and he's too weak even to swallow. I've tried giving him a little water, but - " She made a desperate, helpless gesture. "He can't swallow, and it just chokes him."

"But you can't just - let him die like that. If he has injuries there are no spells for, _make_ spells for them!" He stared mesmerized at the torn-open body of his sometime enemy, starved to the bone and rigid with pain, breathing in careful, shallow gasps as if every breath was blazing agony and yet making no other sound. So far sunk into shock and exhaustion and helplessness that he showed no reaction to his surroundings, the one open eye fixed and staring and unresponsive, so that at first Pomfrey had not even been certain he was still alive.

Dumbledore looked up for the first time, and every year of his long life hung on his face. "It takes days at best, usually weeks, to design a new healing spell, and Severus only has hours. Perhaps if we had found him earlier... but we have no real idea how long he had been - lying there, and he has been silenced so that he couldn't alert us to his presence by crying out."

"He Who Must Not Be Named has really excelled himself this time," McGonagall said bitterly

"Voldemort! Call him by his damned name. Voldemort!"

"Whatever you wish to call him. He's timed it to a nicety. He's seen to it that Severus will suffer horribly in front of us, for hours, while we can do nothing except watch helplessly - and yet he won't live long enough for us to have a chance of saving him. All we can do is - keep him company - company he's in too much pain to be aware of."

"No..."

"Harry - "

"No!" He realized that he was still holding Voldemort's gloating letter, and threw it down on the bed in disgust, wiping his hand across his chest. "There are things you can do - Muggle things."

Dumbledore looked at him sharply. "How do you know?"

"From the telly, the papers - Muggles have drugs that can stop pain, they have machines that can clean the blood, that can keep a body alive - maybe you could keep him alive long enough to make a new spell. Hermione will know more about it than I do."

"Then fetch her, Harry" McGonagall said clearly. "Fetch her as fast as you can." When the sound of his racing feet had faded off down the corridor, she turned to the others and spread her hands helplessly. "It can hardly make things worse."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Hermione Granger stands in the doorway, breathless with haste, Harry at her side babbling "There must be something - something we can do - "

"There is." She took a deep breath and looked at Poppy Pomfrey steadily. "You have to get him onto some sort of life-support - take the strain off his body and onto the machines. The first thing he needs is a drip, and I don't know how to do that - but I know a man who does."

"A _drip_?"

"It's an, uhm, mechanical device for introducing fluid into a vein. It will feed and rehydrate him and balance the minerals in his bloodstream. And before you ask," she said, giving Madam Pomfrey a rather pointed look, "yes it does involve sticking a needle in him - but at this stage I don't think we can afford to be picky, OK?"

"Whom do you know, Hermione?" McGonagall asked, wringing her shaking hands while behind her the Headmaster remained oblivious, gazing at the younger man's agonized, ruined face and talking quietly and earnestly, trying to give some small comfort which the injured man was far beyond understanding.

"My sister's fiancé, Adrian Ferrier - he's a surgical houseman - that is, a junior Muggle healer, in his first year after graduation. I'm sorry I don't know anyone more senior, but Adrian - well, he'll know what needs to be done much better than I do, whether or not he can do it himself, and you can bind him to secrecy as one of my close relatives, without having to Obliviate him. And he's, uhm - I know this sounds silly, but he's a big Science Fiction fan, so he won't be panicked by - well, wizards."

"Where do we find him?"

"He's - he works at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, I don't know where he lives. I'd have to ask Imogen - my sister."

"Does your sister know about - about us?"

"A little, yes."

"Give me her address." Hermione scribbled a few lines on the proffered parchment, and McGonagall crossed to the empty fireplace, opened a small box on the mantelpiece and threw a handful of glinting dust onto the logs below, muttering "Three Broomsticks, Hogsmeade." Thrusting her head into the sudden flare of green flame, she began an urgent, rapid-fire conversation with someone on the other side.

Briefly at a loose end, Harry muttered "You never told me you had a sister, 'Mione."

"Joyce - my Dad's first wife - left him twenty years ago. Immie is eight years older than me: I used to see her sometimes on uhm access visits, but we're not exactly close, and she'd already gone away to university before I started at Hogwarts. Hush, now."

As she looked past him, she saw Snape suddenly arch his back in convulsion and begin to gasp and twist, great shudders running through his torn body, and she knew with sickening certainty that if he had not been silenced he would have been shrieking with pain. She saw Professor Dumbledore, shorn of all dignity and all mirth, holding his colleague's shoulders, trying to steady him and only making at worse, as Snape jerked and tried to pull away as if he thought he was being attacked, and his breathing became wilder and more erratic. As Hermione stared transfixed at this grotesque _pieta_, her heart beating in her throat, McGonagall crossed to the bedside in three long strides, pressed her hands firmly against the sides of Snape's mutilated face to hold him still and snapped "Severus, damn you, listen to me - you _stay_, do you hear me? Help is coming for you - you bloody-well keep breathing until it gets here!" The coldness of his skin was so intense she half expected her palms to come away wet, as if she'd been handling ice, but he was dry as old leather, except where the chemical burns wept fluid.

After a pause which seemed like eternity, though it must have been only a few seconds, the injured man exhaled in a great sigh and fell back against the bed. For an awful moment Hermione, as poised and tense as a frightened deer, thought that he was dead; but then the harsh sound of his breathing resumed, deeper now and very ragged. McGonagall smoothed the heel of her hand across his left temple - the side that wasn't disfigured by blistering acid-burns but only by bruising - pulled a wry face somewhere between laughing and crying and said firmly "Good boy - you stay with us, now. We're getting help for you." She exchanged a look with Madam Pomfrey and Professor Dumbledore which Hermione recognized very well, and she thought that if they had been younger and less dignified at least one of them would have said "Whew!"

As it was, McGonagall murmured the few words that would draw up a field of warm air over the bed, gave Snape's face a gentle, absent-minded pat and stood up, pulling her sleeves fussily back into order and speaking to Hermione as she did so. "I have sent Rosmerta to Apparate to your sister's address, with Floo powder: and pray that we find her at home."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Luck, it seemed, was with them - at least as far as that went. In less than ten minutes the green fire flared again and Rosmerta's anxious face appeared at knee-level. "She's here, Minerva," this apparition said, "but she wants to talk to Hermione - to prove I'm not with You-Know-Who."

With a gasp of relief, Hermione dropped to her knees and thrust her head and shoulders into the fire where Rosmerta had been a second before - and then yelped as her forehead knocked against the older woman's. "Ow, steady on," Rosmerta said vaguely, as Hermione looked up from floor-height at her half-sister's anxious, dazed-looking face.

"Immie we - we need a Muggle - I mean, a non-wizard surgeon _fast_. Give me Adrian's address - will he be on the wards tonight, or is he...? Don't worry: there's no danger in it for him but - but somebody here at the school will die if we don't get help fast and we can't just - can't just take him to hospital, because there's magic involved."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

While they were waiting for Rosmerta to locate Hermione's prospective brother-in-law, McGonagall sent Harry to wake Ron Weasley and tell him they needed him to Floo his brother Bill in Egypt, urgently, and ask him to come to Hogwarts.

Fortune continued to smile, to the extent that Adrian was both off duty and fairly easy to find - a search-party consisting of Rosmerta, Tonks and Remus Lupin tracked him down to a bar on Sauchiehall Street within fifteen minutes, as far as Hermione could gather from McGonagall and Rosmerta's muffled asides. Better still, it was a bar which had a fireplace - though it evidently took some fairly tense magic to make everybody else look away at just the moment that Rosmerta knelt down and shoved her head and shoulders into the suddenly green flames. Especially since, as Hermione would later learn, Rosmerta had first to convince the young surgeon that she wasn't about to burn herself, by holding her hand in the emerald fire and then showing it to him undamaged.

When he saw Hermione's head appearing in the flames in her turn, he looked slightly stunned. "Look - don't argue" Hermione said quickly. "I don't know what Rosmerta's told you but we can sort it out later; we've got a patient here and we need help and you're it, OK?"

"Cool," he replied, rather faintly, and a moment later he had followed her back through the flames - a round-faced young man, stocky, slightly chubby and very black, who stumbled slightly as he came through the fire, blinked bemusedly at them all through thick, circular spectacles and murmured "Beam me up, Scotty!" in a powerfully Geordie accent.

When he caught sight of Snape, however, splayed out across the bed like some horrible Mediaeval _memento mori_ carving, worm-eaten and starved, his expression snapped into focus. "You don't need me, you need a bloody ICU - right now. I'll help you get him to the Infirmary."

"That's - I'm afraid that's not possible," Madam Pomfrey said apologetically. "There's - strong magic involved and a Muggle - that is, a non-wizard - hospital wouldn't know what to do. But - but we - magic folk - we can't cure him with magic either, because there are spells preventing it. We need your help to keep him alive long enough for us to lift those spells and heal him."

"Spells," he muttered, shaking his head dazedly and glancing back at the fireplace. "Please tell me I'm dreaming."

"No, really, you're - "

"PLEASE TELL ME I'M DREAMING."

"Of course you're dreaming," Albus Dumbledore said with a sudden gleam of his usual, amused self. "At any moment you'll find yourself in a final examination in your underwear."

"Thank you. All right. What have you done so far?" Poppy Pomfrey handed him the diagnostic scroll, although the arcane handwriting style made him blink a bit and mutter something about "Typical bloody doctor."

"We know you're only a, a house-husband or whatever you call it, but as you'll see here he's been spell-bound so he can't bleed very much, and if you cut anything you shouldn't cut we'll be able to fix it later once the anti-healing curse has been lifted."

"Terrific," he muttered under his breath, looking from the scroll to Snape with obvious concern. "All right - if I understand this he probably can't die, not for another hour or two at least, so my job is to stabilize him before the spell that's keeping him alive wears out."

"Yes."

"All right. If I make you a shopping-list of equipment and drugs that I'm going to need, will you be able to get them for me?"

"Yes - but don't ask for anything that runs on electrickery if you can avoid it, because it almost certainly won't work here. The equipment I might be able to make copies of and send back the original, once I know what it looks like - the drugs we can, um, acquire - "

"Pilfer," Dumbledore interjected helpfully.

"Yes, well - from hospital stores. I'm sure they won't miss a few - a few bills, or whatever they're called."

"I'm going to need more than a few tablets - starting with a heavy-duty antibiotic and enough diamorphine to stun a mule. Have you run bloods yet?"

"Eh?"

"Blood tests," he said patiently. "On the levels of different electrolytes - mineral salts? - in his blood, leik."

"Er - no, but if you think it will help..." She flourished her wand, muttering under her breath, and a few more lines appeared at the end of the diagnostic scroll.

Adrian glanced down at it. "High on sodium and potassium, low on phosphates, calcium and magnesium - all over the place really. Malnutrition seems to be warring with renal failure... OK." He fished a Muggle biro out of his pocket and scribbled down a list of items on the fresh piece of parchment which Poppy handed to him. "The things I've put a cross by are the most important." He tried not to twitch nervously as the list was passed through the fire to the waiting Rosmerta.

"The first thing I need to do is to control his pain: if he's as conscious as that - diagnostic thingy says then he must be in absolute bloody agony, and it's not just a, a humanitarian issue - the stress of it could bring on a stroke or a heart-attack. The second thing is to get some fluids into him and the third is to do something to stop the infection, and clear the toxins out of his system if we can."

"I had a thought about that," Hermione said eagerly. "The horn of a live unicorn will clear all toxins from any container of liquid, whether it's a poisoned goblet or a stagnant pond, and taken topologically - "

"I'm with you, Thothlet. Taken topologically the human circulatory system is just another container of liquid. OK, it could make a good alternative to dialysis - but pain-control first. God knows how long it's going to take that lot to come back with my diamorphine - anybody in this school got heroin, that you know of?"

"Several," said Hermione, the prefect, and held out her hand. "_Accio heroin_."

"Isn't heroin... addictive?" McGonagall asked anxiously.

"Doesn't really matter - he's only going to get one dose. By the time it wears off he'll either be a fair bit better, or he'll be dead," Adrian replied bluntly. "Do you people at least have a syringe?"

"I can make you one" McGonagall replied composedly, and took a glass tumbler from the shelf and a hairpin from her own hair and reshaped them in front of his wary eyes.

"Smaller than that, please - with accurate gradations in tenths of a millilitre. Thank you." He blinked as three assorted small boxes slipped under the door and flew to Hermione's hand. "Is that...? All right. Now we just need to know the dosage. Does your dad have a MIMS at home? Good. Call him and ask him what the dosage is for heroin for an adult weighing... probably only about eighteen or nineteen kilos, if you consider that the missing limbs must have subtracted about forty per cent of his body-mass, in addition to the emaciation and dehydration."

"A little under three stone" Poppy agreed, tight-lipped.

Hermione turned to McGonagall appealingly. "Can we get somebody to Apparate to my parents with Floo powder, so I can speak to them?"

"Better to Floo you to The Burrow - your head, anyway. Arthur has managed to magically isolate a Muggle fellytone and get it working."

As Hermione knelt uncomfortably on the wooden floor, trying to hold onto the 'phone one-handed whilst explaining to her father just why she wanted to know the safe dosage for a Class A drug, Adrian rolled his eyes. "The next thing we need is a virgin to summon a unicorn."

"Don't look at me" replied Ron Weasley cheerfully, barrelling through the door with Harry in tow. "Bill's on his way - is that my dad I can hear through the Floo? Hi Dad! Urrgh," he added, catching sight of Snape where he lay breathing in careful, desperate gasps. "Ye gods, you weren't kidding, were you Harry? They've really done a number on the poor bastard."

Harry, however, had turned slightly pink, and Dumbledore looked at him speculatively for a moment and then rubbed his hands together. "Harry, dear boy," he said brightly; "am I to understand that you have not yet, er - indulged in the pleasures of the flesh? In company, that is?"

Harry, very pink indeed, mumbled something that sounded like "...nobody's bloody business but mine - unfortunately." Out-loud, however, he said "Why do you want to know - sir?"

"Only, if you were - I realize that this is a delicate matter, but if you were... inexperienced, you might be able to do poor Professor Snape an inestimable service. Magically speaking."

The boy glanced at Snape's terrible injuries, and winced. "All right," he muttered sullenly. "Yes I'm a bloody virgin - all right?" He aimed a swift cuff at Ron, who was sniggering.

"Thank you, Harry. In which case, I need you to go and tell Hagrid that we need a unicorn - as soon as possible, please, and as close to the castle as he can get it to come - and that you should be able to, ah, help him to call it. Ronald, you go with him and see if you can assist."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"God, his wrist is broken as well" Adrian muttered, turning the stick-thin arm gently in square, competent hands, looking for a vein. "Sorry man - just a little sting" he said quietly to Snape as he pushed the needle home left-handed, although it was unlikely the man could hear him, or feel such a minor pain when he had so many greater ones. Still, he kept talking - remembering, as he tried always to remember, that the patient was someone; not just a collection of symptoms. "This should make you feel better soon.

"Who _are_ these freaks who did this to him?" he asked Poppy, his eyes bleak behind the bottle-thick glasses. "This is - it looks like the injuries they tell you to watch out for in abused kids. Somebody just took hold of his hand and twisted until the bone splintered. Who did this?"

"One Whom we do not name."

"O-kaayy..."

"It's a - political issue," McGonagall said delicately. "A very powerful - a very powerful and ambitious Dark wizard is currently trying to take over the organizational structures of wizarding Britain. Severus - Severus was our spy in the enemy camp, for many years, but he was... discovered, and during a skirmish in June they captured him and took their revenge."

"Very bloody slowly, from the look of it." Adrian touched Snape's face gently, his blunt fingers looking as black as jet against the sick man's deadly pallor. "So you're an agent, are you, mate? Brave man. I suppose you can't fix his wrist?"

"Not with these hexes in place," Poppy replied grimly. "I was hoping you could."

"I didn't see it on the diagnostic list - I'm not sure whether it wasn't there or whether I missed it, that stuff is hard on the eyes. Anyway I didn't put plaster on my list - do you have any way of making a cast?"

It was McGonagall who answered him. "If you can set the bones, I can make you a cast."

"All right - as soon as the analgesic kicks in, I'll wash his arm and then get the bone straight."

"Oh, you don't have to touch him to wash him," Poppy replied briskly. "I didn't do it before, because we were - too busy with other issues, but I can easily clean him just with my wand, and it will be a relief to get rid of those!" She pointed her wand eloquently at the squirming mass of maggots which obscured the dreadful gut-wound, and Adrian lunged forward, covering the injury with his own body.

"Oi - leave my wriggly little helpers!"

"Eh?"

"The maggots - leave them be. They're the best thing there is for cleaning dead tissue out of a wound. I know it can seem a bit - a bit squicky, but we're starting to introduce them deliberately in hospitals, to treat infected lesions."

"Dear God - are you certain?"

"Absolutely."

"Well... very well. If you're sure." She gestured with the wand and murmured "_Scourgify_," and the crusting of blood and filth faded away from the patient's skin, revealing the gashed eyebrow which had sealed his left eye shut with blood. Snape flinched slightly as the eye flew open, staring and desperate.

"He doesn't look - could you run that diagnostic - spell or whatever to check his pain-levels? The heroin should have kicked in by now if it's going to work, but his breathing still seems very pained. Literally. I can't say he looks any better for it."

The mediwitch gestured with her wand again and checked the parchment, then shook her head. "It doesn't seem to be working. Evidently the - prohibition against healing and pain-relieving potions extends to Muggle medicines as well. You will see that He Who Must Not Be Named intends - " She pointed at Voldemort's letter, lying discarded at the foot of the bed, and Adrian picked it up and scanned it rapidly. "I'm not sure I believe the part about Sirius Black - they were bitter enemies, as far as I know - but unfortunately the rest seems all too true; Severus has been spell-bound to suffer in agony until he dies." Hermione, in the background, put her hand over her mouth, looking very sick; but Professors McGonagall and Dumbledore looked hardly any better.

"In that case, the diamorphine isn't going to work either, is it? God - the poor bastard. But - " He tapped his nails against his teeth for a moment. "You said that if I cut anything I shouldn't cut, you'd be able to fix it?"

"Yes, but - "

"But me no buts. Can you fix a broken back?"

"He doesn't have a broken back."

"He could have."

Comprehension dawned suddenly on the older witch's face. "Yes, certainly I could repair it, if it isn't left for more than a few days - that should be long enough. Where do you want - " Before she could finish the sentence, two things happened: the fire flared suddenly green again as a rangy, red-haired young man with an earring and a ponytail and a great, half-healed scar across his cheekbone stepped through it into the room, and Snape arched off the bed in another involuntary spasm, his mouth stretched open in a terrible silent scream as the movement jarred his torn belly. "Oh, God" Poppy muttered as she rushed to his side, trying to hold his hips steady as Professor Dumbledore braced his shoulders again and he heaved and coughed and tried to retch on nothing. After a long moment the injured man slumped back against the bed again, trembling, his breathing coming very rapid and shallow. The mediwitch let go of him and drew her wand across in a long upwards flick, and suddenly the magnified sound of Snape's heartbeat filled the room - thin and thready and fading fast.

Hermione, watching, felt sick and dizzy with grief. Almost, almost she buried her face against Bill Weasley's broad chest, not wanting to see the Potions master die, but then she saw Professor McGonagall take Snape's skeletal hand between hers, gentle and careful of his damaged wrist. "Severus," McGonagall said, softly but firmly. "Severus, listen to me. I know you've run a long race - such a very long race, but you're almost at the finish now. Just hold on for a few hours more and then you can rest, I promise you." Gradually, his heartbeat strengthened a little, though it still sounded stuttering and uncertain.

"All right," Adrian said grimly. "I don't much like it, but we're going to have to cut his spine. If we can't stop the pain the stress is going to kill him anyway and frankly, if we can't stop it he'd be better dead. Do you have a scalpel?"

"No need," Poppy Pomfrey replied, as Dumbledore did something complex with his wand and the injured man drifted up off the bed as if born on a stretcher of air, the brittle, shredded remains of his robe falling away as he rose. Adrian swallowed slightly, and then knelt down by the bed so that he could look at his patient from underneath. The sight made him wince - even with the excess blood cleared away, the man's back was a raw horror. Taking a breath to steady himself, he pointed at a point high up the saw-toothed ridge of Snape's spine, a little below the shoulders.

"Here, please."

The mediwitch aimed her wand, very precisely and carefully, and said clearly "_Diffindo_." Instantly, Snape arched again, gasping, and his magnified heartbeat thumped down like a hammer - but then he drew another gasping breath and another, ragged, almost sobbing, and the racing heart steadied and strengthened. As Dumbledore gestured with his wand again, lowering the injured man back gently onto the bed, still with a thin layer of air under him to cushion his wounds, Adrian stood up and laid his sugar-pink palm along the side of Snape's ravaged face. "That's better now, isn't it man?" he said softly. "Much better."

"Now that that's settled," said the calm voice of Bill Weasley, "would somebody mind explaining what's going on?"

* * *

**Author's note:**

Most people in the U.K. will know what a Geordie accent sounds like, but if you're from elsewhere, and if you've ever seen the British "Inspector Morse" detective drama series, it may help you to know that Adrian sounds like Sergeant Lewis. Only more so.

Quidditch is such a dangerous sport that it must often result in broken necks and backs, yet we do not see any paraplegic wizards or witches - so I think it's safe to assume that magic can mend a severed spinal cord.

MIMS is the _Monthly Index of Medical Specialities_, a list of drugs and dosages much used by medical personnel in the UK and Australia. The US equivalent is the _Physician's Desk Reference_.

Snape's extremely low body-weight at this point is based on the fact that there are many mentions of adult male concentration-camp survivors who were down to about 60lb and still apparently walking about, even if only just. Snape is quite a tall man but always a scrawny, narrowly-built one, and he has been starved far past the point of being able to walk, were he still to have the legs to do it with (we are told in _Missing in Action_ that he hasn't been fed for four months, and he was thin to begin with): the Death Eaters probably dumped him because keeping him alive without feeding him was getting to be too much effort. I am assuming, therefore, that were he still whole he would weigh around 66lb - but the mutilations have cost him about forty per cent of his body-mass, so what's left weighs about 40lb.

Normally we know that fireplaces have to be connected to the Floo network through a formal process which is under Ministry control; but for the sake of the plot I am assuming that it is possibly temporarily to connect any hearth to the Floo network, provided there is Floo powder in the flames on both sides of the connection.

Adrian tends to address Snape as "man" not because he is black but because he's a Geordie. In Newcastle, even women call each other "man."

This chapter has been slightly edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to reduce the degree to which Dumbledore thinks of Snape as having been his friend prior to his disappearance.


	4. 02 Emergency Ward 9¾

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**2: EMERGENCY WARD 9¾**

Since no analgesic would work on him, and they dare not cut his spine too high in case it interfered with his breathing, Adrian had to set Snape's wrist without anaesthetic as best he could; pulling the bones straight with a swift, steady hand and profuse apologies, while McGonagall reshaped a _papier maché_ tray into a lightweight cast. It helped that Snape's forearm was largely unburned, although there was a red streak of scald near the elbow, and an area of blistering on the back of his hand. Even so, just looking at that arm made Adrian wince. He could see the twin bones all the way from elbow to wrist, before McGonagall put the cast on; knife-sharp bones barely covered by a thin scraping of white skin which was decorated with purple, finger-shaped bruises, and he realized with a sick little flinching of his own gut that the man had no fingernails.

Just as they finished, Rosmerta's pretty, peevish face appeared in the fire. "There's no way I'm going to get all this lot through the fireplace, Dumbledore - open a window, do, and Accio it. I've got it in the yard at the pub."

It was Hermione, being the least preoccupied person in the room, who opened the big window and called out "_Accio Adrian's medical supplies_. Stand clear," she said to Adrian himself; "it could arrive with a rush."

"It could arrive with a waterlily, for all I care." The first flood of adrenalin had worn off, leaving him feeling distinctly frazzled and unpleasantly sober; and, perversely, now that he had actually managed to reduce the patient's bitter agony to something almost bearable, the knowledge of how much pain the man had been in made him feel sick and shaky.

When his order of medical equipment arrived, however, clattering over the windowsill in a hailstorm of steel and glass, he snapped back instantly into focus; actually humming to himself as he extracted the appropriate combination of electrolytes from their ampoules and injected them through the rubber access port on the drip bag. Poppy Pomfrey offered to make her own _ersatz_ drip-stand and send back the one they had purloined, and he agreed that she should do so as soon as the patient was stable; drip-stands were fairly expensive and often in short supply, but the hospital had been having a quiet Tuesday afternoon when he went off duty, and was unlikely to notice if they borrowed this one from stores for a few hours.

"There's no time to mess about, in any case; I need to balance his electrolytes before the staying-alive spell wears out, or he could go into seizure and flatline." He looked at their blank faces, and realized that of the five other people in the room (not counting the patient himself, who was beyond all such considerations), only Hermione had the remotest idea what he had just said. "I need to bring the - the minerals in his blood back to their normal, healthy levels as quickly as I can," he said patiently, "because any serious imbalance might bring on another convulsion which could cause his heart to stop beating."

When he had the drip set up, he took Snape's skeletal arm between his hands again, very gently, and started searching for a visible vein - a difficult and fiddly task, when all the man's veins were so shrunken with dehydration, but at least the extreme whiteness of his skin helped. He would absolutely hate to have to find a vein in his own arm under these circumstances. "Sorry, mate," he said softly; "I know I seem to be always messing about with this arm, but it's the only one there is, see?" That could hardly be news to Snape himself; the stump where his right lower leg should be was red-raw and showing bone, but where his left leg and arm had been the skin had long since healed over, although there still seemed to be a patch of ulceration at his hip, under the blistering acid burns. As the needle went in Snape's heartbeat jerked audibly, and then settled again when nothing else bad followed that single sting.

Adrian nodded to the onlookers: Dumbledore, who had never stirred from Snape's side; McGonagall, whey-faced and shaken but looking slightly more positive now; Poppy and Hermione, both of them wearing militantly competent expressions despite the tears in their eyes; and Bill Weasley, who was obliviously poring over his own version of a diagnostic chart, and muttering under his breath. He both looked and sounded to Adrian like a hacker trying to analyze a difficult computer virus, although the word "hex," in this context, was probably not short for "hexadecimal." "I've put a strong antibiotic in with the drip; fingers crossed, but I think we might get away with that one, because strictly speaking an antibiotic isn't a healing potion - it's a poison. A very specific poison," he continued before anyone could interrupt him, "which only kills bacteria - the organisms which cause the infection.

"All right." He drew a deep breath, feeling that he was quite a long way out of his depth and paddling furiously - and almost the worst part was that he would never be able to boast about it to his colleagues afterwards. "That will resolve the dehydration - eventually - and when his electrolytes are more balanced I'll add some glucose and protein to feed him. In addition to the partial kidney failure and the risk of seizures - which could continue to be a danger for a couple of days - there's also a risk of developing blood-clots due to the dehydration, which - well, which could be fatal, if one reached his lung."

"I'll set up a standing diagnostic spell to warn us if a clot forms: if it does I should be able to dissolve it magically, because like your anti bio-tick it's not strictly a healing spell."

"Good. Check his electrolytes for me again in about twenty minutes. The next step is going to be either the burns or the dialysis-by-unicorn, and since the Virgin Soldier isn't back yet..."

"As if - as if everything else they did wasn't _enough_," Poppy said shakily, "they had to pour acid over him as well."

"Oh, I don't think that's how they did it," Adrian replied absently. "From the pattern, I'd say they dipped his - academic gown, or whatever you call those dress-things you all wear - in acid and then dressed him in it. That's why the fabric's rotted so completely - and why all the burns are below the neck, except for that one on his forehead which must be where they dragged it on over his head... I'm going to need gloves for this: can you see them among that lot?"

"No need." She pointed her wand, and a thin, shimmering field appeared around the young surgeon's hands.

"Cool. OK, the next thing I need is a clean sponge - and I mean very clean, please - and... let's say, about three pints of milk."

"Eh?"

"Don't worry - I haven't taken leave of my senses, and it's not for his ivory complexion: it will neutralize any remaining acid."

Without warning, McGonagall clapped her hands and called out "Rinna - to the infirmary, please!" With an even louder clap, the hospital wing's head house-elf materialized in the middle of the room.

Adrian said "Aaah!" and stepped back smartly, then tried to pretend he hadn't.

"We need milk, please, Rinna," McGonagall said composedly; "three pints of clean milk and a perfectly clean sponge, and then stand by to await further orders."

"As Miss Deputy HeadMiss pleases. Your wish, my command, etc.."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

As Adrian worked, wiping the clean milk across the burns and then dressing them with sheets of hydrogel foam, he kept up a constant emollient murmur. "Good man - that's it - I'm sorry if this hurts a bit but I have to treat these burns if you're going to get better - good man - you're going to be just fine." He wasn't sure whether it was a good sign or not, but Snape had started actually to react to what he was doing, wincing and flinching slightly whenever he touch an area for which the man still had sensation, instead of just staring in blank desperation. His heartbeat and his breathing raced and slowed, raced and slowed as Adrian moved from one area of burning to the next.

When it came time to treat his back, Adrian slid his arm behind Snape's shoulders and rolled him over gently, trusting to Poppy's spell to prevent either the maggots or the man's own guts from spilling out. The man weighed no more than a small child. His flanks were hollowed out worse than a greyhound's, and the curve of every individual rib cast its own sharp shadow: starved until he looked more like some bizarre anatomical specimen than a still-living being.

At least, he could no longer feel the searing pain of the gut-wound; it would have been better if they could have prevented him from feeling his entire upper body as well, but cutting the spine any higher would have left the patient breathing only shallowly and from the diaphragm and the young surgeon was afraid to risk it, when the burns themselves were likely to cause respiratory complications. Even cutting it where he had cut could lead to slight impairment - but cutting any lower would have left the man still tortured by abdominal pain.

The induced spinal-cord break at Thoracic Five did at least mean that Snape's skin was numbed from just below the nipple-line down at the front, and slightly higher than that at the back: but that still left him sensitive to a large area of injury across his shoulders and chest, including some of the worst of the acid burns, and Adrian noted rather queasily that somebody armed with, possibly, a razor and a cigarette lighter (or their magical equivalents) had already paid a lot of attention to his nipples, even before the burning cloth went over him. It was difficult to tell how badly his back was burned - the whole thing was just a half-flayed ruin of cuts and welts and blisters anyway, and the only sensible thing to do with it was to treat the whole mess as one huge lesion and dress it accordingly. When the job was done the patient's breathing became noticeably more stable, and some of the tension slackened out of the rigid line of his jaw.

Extensive and raw-looking though the burns were, they only penetrated to full-thickness in a few places; most of them were second or even first degree. Without magic, the extent of the burning, combined with Snape's other injuries, would still have been seriously life-threatening; but Adrian trusted, most sincerely, that all he had to do was keep the wounds clean and moist and as far as possible comfortable for a few days, until Mr Magic-Hacker came up with a way of enabling Poppy Pomfrey to heal them - hopefully, before the three-day mark at which the secondary complications of burning would start to get really nasty. And again, the hydrogel dressings should be under the radar as far as the anti-healing hex was concerned, since they did nothing actively to heal the patient; only made it much easier for him to heal himself.

"Of course," he said to the world in general, as he wrapped the elasticated netting over the top of the dressings to hold them in place, "all this - I mean using milk and so on - this is all make-it-up-as-you-go-along, MASH-Unit stuff; but I always rather fancied myself as Hawkeye Pierce."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"That's looking quite a bit better already," he said, looking at the fresh diagnostic sheet which Madam Pomfrey had handed him. "Still very high on potassium, of course; it's much easier to put things in than take them out. Something else we have to consider - at the moment his lungs seem fairly clear but there's always a risk, with severe burns, that it will disrupt his fluid balance and cause pulmonary oedema - water on the lungs, right? That thing there that looks like a bomb is a cylinder of compressed oxygen, with a pneumatic - air-controlled? - non-electric? - conserver; that's a thing that responds to his breathing and adds a puff of extra oxygen every time he breathes in. If he starts to sound bubbly at all, we'll need to put an oxygen mask on him and hook him up. Or a nasal cannula - whichever he seems most comfortable with.

"In the meantime... Could you see if that little - Yoda-lady could find me a plant-mister; boiled, please. And some distilled water - you do have distilled water?"

"You interest me strangely. Do tell." That was Dumbledore - looking slightly less abstracted and a great deal more cheerful, now that Snape was no longer in such overwhelming agony, and was beginning to look more like a patient to be treated and less like a somehow still-breathing corpse to be mourned.

"Another MASH-Unit improvisation; I'm going to aerosol antibiotic topically directly into the gut-wound, to keep it clean until I can seal it. The maggots will tend to clean out bacteria anyway - but I don't want to take any chances. Belt and braces, leik, in case the infection's spread further than the wiggly things."

"I thought you were going to - well, Apparate, or whatever it's called."

"Operate. How long do you think it will take you lot to break the - curses?"

Bill Weasley ran his hand through his hair distractedly. "God knows. I'll work as fast as I can, but You-Know-Who has set the most godawful bloody mare's nest of hexes on him. Realistically, it could take two to three days to sort out."

"And when you lift them, will they come off individually, or all together?"

"All together, most likely."

"All right. In some respects that suits my purposes. On the one hand, the sooner you can magically heal the patient and block his pain the better, but at the same time Madam Pomfrey tells me it will be much easier for her to heal his gut if I actually do a normal surgical end to end anastomosis on the most damaged areas first... that means, if I cut out the portions which are too shredded to retrieve, and join the cut ends back together. With dissolving stitches, you understand - I mean, ones that dissolve after a week or two when he's healed, not right now. I'd prefer to do that while the curse which prevents him from bleeding to death is in place - but at the same time I actually want to leave the gut wound for a day or two to let the maggots do their work. It will make it much easier to resect the damage successfully if all necrosed tissue has been snipped away first, and nothing does that so beautifully as a maggot. So a delay of a couple of days in lifting the curses is ideal from that point of view: and I can keep him at least tolerably comfortable with dressings in the interim."

"What about his - his face?" Hermione asked.

"I'm not sure." He wiped the back of his wrist across his forehead. "Really it ought to be stitched; that will give a much more accurate alignment for Madam Pomfrey to work her wonders on, and leave him with less scarring in the long term. You might not think that that matters much, but facial scarring can have a big psychological impact. Using paper sutures - little tags you stick on with glue" he clarified, with a nod to Poppy - "would be less precise and they only really join the surface, skin injury - whereas this goes right through his facial muscles and the mucosa. And even if he were clean shaven, using paper sutures would be a pig on an area which is going to grow stubble.

"But if I do stitch him at this point - with a needle and thread, you understand," he added with another nod to Poppy - "that's going to mean doing it without anaesthetic, and remember he can feel his face - whereas he can't feel his abdomen at present. I know stitching his face would be - a drop in the ocean, compared to what he's already suffered, but I don't want him to get the idea that he's still among people who want to inflict pain on him. Doing his wrist was bad enough, but there's something so... deliberate about stitches."

"That sounds as if you think you should leave it until the curses are broken."

"Possibly. But in that case, any change of facial expression is going to hurt him. I don't know what to do for the best."

"If it helps," Madam Pomfrey said tiredly, "I could use a shaving charm on him. They're a bit unpredictable - you can end up losing your eyebrows - but that's not the end of the world, is it? If I use a charm, I can shave him clean without hurting him, and then stop him from growing stubble for as long as your... pay-per-sitters are in place."

"Very well. I suppose if - if using paper sutures causes the wound to start healing without the edges being properly lined up, once you can work your - your magic on him you could open the wound again and re-align it."

"Yes."

"In fact, we really should re-open the edges of the wound anyway before I stitch them: it would give a better join. All right. Later, though. His skin is so tightened by dehydration I'm not sure I could even get the edges to touch at this point, so it will have to wait until probably tomorrow morning. If..."

"If he survives the night" McGonagall chimed in softly.

"Well - yes. Basically. Besides, it's an elective procedure, really. Having his face slashed open may look bloody awful, but it's one of the few things wrong with him which isn't life-threatening. It's the level of toxicity in his system which is worrying me now."

They were relieved, therefore, when Harry came clattering through the door, muddy and rather out of breath. "Sorry it took so long," he panted, "but they were deep into the forest and we had to dodge the giant spiders and everything."

"_What_ giant spiders?" Adrian said with a slight squeak in his voice.

"Oh... you know. The usual. Anyway Hagrid's got one for you down in the bushes at the back of Sproutie's vegetable patch. A unicorn, that is - not a giant spider."

"Oh good. Spider-silk makes quite a good dressing, but I don't think involving Shelob would be at all helpful at this point."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

They took him through backways and passageways and private stairways, laid quietly on a stretcher with warm blankets over him and the drip-stand bobbing along beside like some sort of bizarre puppy, and McGonagall walking ahead to clear their road. Adrian tried hard not to be unnerved by the sight of a stretcher which bloody levitated. He was becoming unpleasantly aware that he probably wasn't dreaming - had even surreptitiously stuck a needle in himself to wake himself up, and it hadn't helped.

Really, he should have been thrilled - surely it was every fan's secret longing, to step into a real world that was like something in the books? But he was more of a Science Fiction than a Fantasy fan anyway - aliens would be fine, but magic was, well, _embarrassing_, and it made it easier to deal with Snape's injuries if he could tell himself he was dreaming them. Realizing that the man really had been tortured to the brink of death over a period of months, and that now his only chance of survival - and his friends' only hope for a future unmarred by bitter grief - depended on some wee guy from Newcastle who was only four months out of Medical School was frankly terrifying. But if he'd been scared of playing God, he wouldn't have picked a career in surgery...

When he saw the unicorn, though, everything - everything went out of his head except wonder. Even the fact that the man standing next to it looked like a psycho-hillbilly at least ten foot tall wasn't enough to detract from the moment. It - he - looked like a Mediaeval tapestry sprung to life, with his delicate, deer-like cloven hooves, his swishing lion's tail with its flag of shining silk, and the great spiral twist of the horn. Yet all this was not some fluffy New Age fantasy but uncompromisingly real and animal; there was sweat on the shimmeringly-white coat and mud on the fine-boned legs, the thing had obvious and quite impressive genitalia and the horn was very sharp and strong and obviously not there just for ornament. The head and neck were those of a graceful horse, but the body-shape reminded him of an eland more than anything else.

"Yeh'd be the Muggle doctor, then," said the hillbilly, red lips appearing startlingly through the forest of beard.

"Er - yes. Right. I'm Adrian. Pleased to meet you."

"Hagrid, same. Ye do what yeh can for him." The startling apparition crossed to the stretcher in a single stride and touched Snape's dressing-covered shoulder with unexpected delicacy, though his thumb was almost as thick as the man's whole arm, as emaciated as he was. "Welcome home. I'd've been up teh see yeh already, but I cahn' rightly fit into them little private rooms in the infirmary" the giant said in a surprizingly soft, gruff voice. Dumbledore might think that the injured man was beyond recognizing anybody at all, but judging from his heart-rate he seemed to find Hagrid's looming presence reassuring - even if Adrian found it anything but.

The easiest place to find a substantial blood-vessel was at the raw stump of the amputated leg, where the cut and ragged and magically-sealed ends of veins and arteries could still be traced - and it had the advantage of being an area Snape could no longer feel. If this curious mythological procedure worked, and if the patient survived, and if he proved to need more than a couple of repeat performances, Adrian would have to think about putting in a venous catheter - perhaps even a shunt or a subcutaneous port. But for the moment, speed was of the essence. Taking a scalpel, he made a swift, deep cut along the line of a vein. The vessel tried to seal itself off again almost instantly, as all major vessels had been spelled to do (but not minor ones; Dumbledore had said grimly that the enemy wizards liked to see at least a little blood, when they were playing) - but the young houseman pressed his thumbs either side of the incision and held it open forcefully, until the dark blood welled up and started to spill.

Harry, red-faced with furious embarrassment, went to the unicorn and laid his hand on the white neck. The stallion (buck?) snorted and sidled slightly, shivering where the boy's hand touched him, and then permitted himself to be guided towards Snape, stepping delicately, his dark, horse-like eyes wide and his ears flicking. The beast seemed to understand what was required of him, though, for when he reached the injured man he tossed his narrow head, snorted and then bowed his neck and dipped his horn with some precision into the inch-long cut.

There was a - Adrian was never afterwards sure what, it was a sound a scent a sensation, all and none of those, the universe twitched and shifted as if someone had just tugged the cloth it was painted on, and no more than that, before the unicorn lifted his fringed jaw and backed away. Madam Pomfrey silently ran the diagnostic spell again and then passed the parchment into the young houseman's magic-gloved hands. Adrian raised both eyebrows. They had been gambling twice - once that the unicorn's horn would work in the same way on a human circulatory system as it did on a poisoned chalice, and once that the anti-healing hex would not be activated by what was, in its essence, a cleansing rather than a healing spell. It had worked better than their wildest hopes. Not only had the brief contact scrubbed the bacterial toxins and the residue of harmful potions out of Snape's system; it had also dropped his blood potassium and sodium levels back to normal parameters. Evidently, unicorn-magic interpreted elevated electrolytes as just another sort of poison.

"Wow," he said, highly impressed. "We need one of these guys at the Infirmary."

Minerva McGonagall snorted. "To do that, you would need a team of virgins over the age of puberty - in Glasgow."

"Could be a problem, yes."

Hagrid bowed to the unicorn, and spoke to him softly. "We thank yeh, Fair One, for yehr aid, and would be thankful if yeh could come to us again for the same purpose - when?"

"Tomorrow morning - say about 7am? Could you be up for 7am, Harry?"

"I suppose." He glanced at Snape and pulled a face. "Yes, of course."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Poppy Pomfrey glanced at the latest diagnostic sheet, then looked at Snape's white, strained face and shivered. "We are now officially... We are now officially on our own. The spell that's been keeping him alive - isn't."

"That just means he can die though, doesn't it? - it doesn't mean he _will_. I'm quite pleased with him, under the circumstances. His temperature is still low, but that's only to be expected in a burns patient and he seems to be fairly stable now... and a lot closer to comfortable. In fact I think he's ready to start on a little glucose, now. Though we'll have to bring the glucose in slowly and monitor his bloods - he's been burning his own muscles and internal organs for months just to stay alive, and if the changeover back to burning sugars causes his phosphate levels to drop too far too fast he could arrest. But that's all right so long as you check his electrolytes every half-hour or so. The real danger will come when the complications of the burns build up. Can you tell how long ago he was burned?"

"We're not sure... well, we think he must have been smuggled into the school somehow during the small hours of the morning - he could hardly have been brought through into the back of a busy classroom when people were awake - but that fool Professor Sweeney didn't check the stores yesterday, so we don't know whether he was brought in this morning or - or yesterday morning. Since he can't call out, or move under his own power..."

"So it could be fifteen hours - or nearly forty."

"Longer, if he was burned significantly before they moved him... I'll see if - " She made some more complex gestures with the wand, and then checked the parchment. "Almost forty-one hours," she said quietly, "so he probably had been lying there... Sit down, dear" she added to Hermione, who had turned distinctly green. The two boys had been sworn to secrecy and sent off down to the Great Hall to get their dinner, but Hermione was far too shaken to have an appetite (whereas nothing on earth would prevent the boys from eating whatever was set in front of them like a pair of starving gannets); and since Adrian was her future brother-in-law and it was her impressive bit of lateral thinking concerning unicorns which had probably saved Snape's life, she had been tacitly accepted as a member of the team.

Besides, with Snape himself lost somewhere far beyond coherence or capability, and the unlamented Professor Sweeney having apparently handed in her notice _via_ Madam Hooch in a moment of stammering hysteria, there was nobody but Hermione left to brew whatever potions the infirmary might require. So she stayed, keeping herself quietly out of the way with her hands clasped together in anxiety while Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall talked to the patient in low voices, encouraging and calming him as best they could, and Bill Weasley sat in the corner and his own little world, scribbling furiously. Beyond the door of the private room, the life of the hospital wing ticked over under the anxious eye of Filius Flitwick: fortunately there were no other inpatients at present.

Adrian clicked his tongue, frowning. "With extensive, fairly severe burning like this, there are major complications which usually become potentially life-threatening between seventy-two and ninety-six hours after the injury, so we have thirty-one hours before we need to start worrying. After that - I _really_ hope Bill can get those hexes lifted. His hormone-balances are going to go more and more all over the place, he can't regulate his own body-temperature - that's part of why he's so cold - and despite that his metabolism is going to go into overdrive. He must already have had some increase due to the infection anyway, and now, with the burns - well, it's already starting to climb, you can see from these readings, and by tomorrow his system is going to be racing so fast he'll start burning up and trying to digest his own tissues. More than he is already, I mean. And he hasn't any body-mass left to burn. He really needs to be fed, and fed well, before that happens - but even if he didn't have the gut-wound, his stomach's so shrunken I couldn't get more than a trickle into him anyway."

Once Poppy had cleaned the awful gut wound of everything except maggots, Adrian had sprayed it with aeorosoled antibiotic and then covered the whole thing, maggots and all, with a porous dressing. This was a great relief to everybody except himself; as a surgeon he could contemplate the sight and the abattoir stink of infected human innards without turning a hair but he appreciated that lay-persons were more sensitive about these things, and in any case the dressing conserved both the heat of the wound and the heat generated by the maggots themselves. Between the disruption of thermal control caused by the burns and the sheer lack of anything to feed on except the wasted remnant of his own muscle-tissue Snape was still borderline hypothermic, despite McGonagall's warming spell, and needed all the help he could get to maintain his body-temperature.

"Now that his bloods are OK-ish I'm going to add some protein in with the IV but I don't know if I can get it into him faster than the burns are going to eat it up, and he's only about ten kilos over his skeletal weight anyway - he can't _spare_ any more. He would already have died of the fluid-loss from the burns, on top of the existing dehydration, if it hadn't been for the spell holding him in his body - and as you say, we won't have that luxury this time around. In fact - I really hate to do this but I think I'm going to have to call the hospital and tell them I'm sick, so I can stay here with him. I really don't want to leave him until he's properly stabilized or - "

"Dead," Poppy replied, with a horrible sort of professional composure, as she spread a blanket over the man she had cared for like a son and spelled it warm. At least the peculiar, rubbery-looking Muggle wound-dressings which covered most of his torso meant that she now could put a blanket over him, without it sticking to his injuries.

"Yes. But the idea is to avoid that. The next thing is to put in a catheter to monitor his urine output - he'll need one anyway, with his spine cut."

"What's a catheter?"

"A fine, fairly soft tube - sometimes you put them into veins to draw blood, like this one connecting the drip to his arm, but in this case it'll be a thicker one - quite a bit thicker, actually - which goes up the urethra and into the bladder, to draw off urine."

"You're going to put it _where_? If you mean what I think you mean - "

"Um - yeah, probably. It - well, goes up his dick. Not to put too fine a point on it. I know it's a bit... especially to a bloke, but it's not like he's going to feel it, is it?"

"Good God, do you Muggles really - "

"**Yes** we Muggles really. We can't just wave a bloody bit of twig and make everything suddenly all right, and _neither can you_ at present. That was why you needed me, wasn't it? Everything has to go by tube - like the London Underground."

"I have a map of the London Underground on my knee" Dumbledore said helpfully. "Look!"

"Er - yes, that's - really interesting."

"And you're sure - you're quite sure that this is necessary?" Madam Pomfrey said rather pleadingly. "And safe?"

"Completely safe, if the tube is sterile - which it is. And besides, there's so much swelling that - well, he needs all the help he can get to keep everything open and working." He knew intellectually, of course, that torturers were likely to go for the most pain-sensitive areas and that the genitals were bound to be a favourite target, but the mess of cuts and burns and black bruises still made him wince in masculine empathy, and it was a relief to know that the patient could no longer feel either that or the bruising and tearing due, he presumed, to repeated sexual assault.

For that matter, it was a relief that Snape couldn't feel the catheter going in, which in his confused and panic-stricken frame of mind he would probably have interpreted as some new torture - even though Adrian kept up a constant, reassuring chatter, telling him roughly what he was doing and why on the off-chance that he might understand even a fraction of it. Or at least, that he might understand that he was being informed, was being treated as a rational being and not a piece of meat.

When that was done, the houseman went and stood by McGonagall, looking down at his patient thoughtfully. Snape's face was still pinched and dazed, and that was only to be expected: even if he could feel nothing now below his chest, he still had full sensation for a substantial area of severe burning and probably of neuralgia from the severed arm, quite apart from the psychological burden of remembered trauma and terror, and the mental confusion caused by starvation and by sheer exhaustion and lack of REM sleep. Nevertheless, he no longer looked as if he would be screaming in agony if he could. Whimpering quietly, perhaps, but that was still a distinct improvement. "Good man," he said softly. "You just stay with us now, do you hear me? Just stay with us and you'll be fine, I promise."

He touched the side of Snape's face, pressing his thumb gently against the sharp, newly-shaven chin. "Open up for me, please. It's all right" he added quietly, guessing why the man shuddered as he obeyed. "Nothing bad, leik. I just want to check your teeth, and that." The man's tongue was still leathery and swollen with dehydration, and he had several broken teeth. "Good man, that's it. We'll need to ask your mum to have a look at this when he's stable, Thothlet," he said abstractedly. "Teeth aren't really my thing - and I don't suppose anything I might do to numb them is going to work, is it? Could one of you lot do that cleaning thing on his mouth, please? There's a lot of blood, and if they've been sexually... well. You can imagine."

"Unfortunately, yes" Dumbledore said sadly, performing the cleansing spell with a tenderness which suggested that the younger man might be more to him than just a colleague in trouble. "But he's here now, and we'll do everything we can to make things - to make things as right for him as they can be. At least he is - surrounded by people who care about him. Even if he doesn't believe it."

"What's he like when he is - when he's more himself?"

"Clever, competitive, cantankerous and contrary" McGonagall said with a strained smile, though there were tears in her eyes as she said it.

"Well - that's hopeful. What do you think, mate - will you get better for me out of pure bloody-minded determination not to be beaten? Could someone call that - that elf," he said, feeling embarrassingly silly, "and ask her to get me a little chamomile tea and some cotton buds, please, if you have any? The drip will take care of the dehydration, but his mouth must feel horrible, leik. His throat is too weak and dry and sore to swallow, and he has the gut-wound anyway so I can't give him a proper drink, but if I swab his mouth with something moist it will be much more comfortable for him. Peppermint would be fine too, but chamomile is slightly antiseptic so it will help with his teeth. And... do you have something like Vaseline, to put on his lips?" As cracked and bleeding as they were...

"Vassy-lean?" Poppy said anxiously: "I'm afraid I don't know what that is..."

"We have more chamomile," Hermione said with a faint smile. "Chamomile and peppermint lotion is just as good as Vaseline, and it tastes a lot nicer."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Poppy Pomfrey looked down at the patient and sighed. "I suppose I shall have to take this off for him" she said, touching the ends of his filth-clotted hair. "It must be uncomfortable for him - there are things living in it - and even if I could clean it it's matted beyond redemption. But it seems such a pity, when he has - when having long hair was one of his few real vanities, and he has already lost so very much."

"Is he still conscious?" Hermione asked softly. "I mean - able to understand what's happening to him at all?"

Professor Dumbledore cleared his throat. "So far as I can tell he's still aware," he said sadly; "they've curse-bound him so he can't not be. But conscious? It's a matter of definition. All he seems to be aware _of_ is raw physical sensation - and absolute terror of physical sensation."

"If he can't stop feeling, then we should give him something to feel that's nice" Hermione said firmly. "I'm sure I could get the mats out of his hair - I've done it for Crookshanks often enough, and I've got a special tool for doing it. And having his hair washed and brushed ought to be all right because it won't feel anything like what He Who Must Not Be Named did to him."

Adrian coughed gently. "Don't be too sure, Thothlet. If he's been sexually assaulted on top of all the rest, which appears to be the case, then having someone grip him by the hair might have unfortunate associations. One way or another."

Hermione thought about that for a moment, winced and then set her mouth in a determined straight line. "I don't intend to be - grabby" she said firmly. Taking her wand in her right hand, she held out her left and said clearly "_Accio cat-comb, mat-splitter and slicker-brush_."

After a minute or two the named implements thunked into her hand. She looked at Madam Pomfrey and Professor Dumbledore enquiringly, and when they nodded in encouragement she went and sat down by Snape's bedside. "Hello professor - sir," she said gently. "Please don't be alarmed. It's Hermione Granger, sir, and I'm just going to tidy your hair for you and make you more comfortable."

Snape gave no sign whatsoever that he had heard her, but continued to stare at the ceiling with wide, blank, terrified eyes, his breathing shallow but reassuringly even. Hermione tried not to notice the twin slashes which bisected his cheeks, his irregular yellow teeth showing horrifyingly through the gashes. The skull beneath the skin - his skin was drawn so tight with famine that it hardly covered his bones, dragging the edges of the cut flesh apart and baring the gums beneath, and shaving off the lank beard had only revealed more layers of bruising beneath it. She touched a lock of his hair lightly, without putting any pressure on his scalp, and winced. That straight black mane of his tended to be rather greasy at the best of times, but now it was clogged with oil and blood and worse things she didn't even want to speculate about and there were, as Madam Pomfrey had said, things living in it.

A quick, muttered _Scourgify_ took care of the worst of the muck, at least, but when she started to stroke her fingers lightly across his scalp, feeling for the most obvious mats, he flinched at her touch and his breath sucked in sharply. "It's all right, professor" she said steadily, in the face of his rigid fear and misery. "This won't take long, and you'll feel better for it."

She learned to feel for the mats from the ends inwards instead of from the scalp outwards, minimizing the times she had to touch him. At every hard, felted knot she came to she gripped the hair between the mat and his scalp, to prevent tugging, and then stroked the sharp, shielded blade of the mat-splitter through the knot from his head outwards, cutting through the clot again and again, until she could rake out the remains by wielding the slicker-brush. The pile of discarded hair on the pillow grew larger and larger as she worked, until it seemed a wonder that he still had any left to save.

When at last she could find no more significant mats she began to stroke Snape's hair out smooth and straight with the fine-toothed comb she more commonly used on Crookshanks: fine enough to filter out any lingering little inhabitants. Once again he flinched and stiffened, as far as he had the strength to do so, but when she murmured reassuringly and kept on brushing in steady, even strokes he visibly relaxed again, giving in to the strange sensation which was, indeed, nothing at all like anything which Voldemort or his followers had done. "You've got a good bedside manner, Thothlet" Adrian said, grinning, and she gave him a watery smile.

"Should I wash...?"

"You might as well, dear" Madam Pomfrey said, nodding. "Since he seems to be all right about it. Knowing Severus it will be greasy again in a few hours anyway but at least it will make him more comfortable for now. I'll get you a cleansing potion."

"Uhm, no. Thank you. Hair is one of the things that Muggles do better than wizards. _Accio shampoo_."

While they were waiting for the shampoo to show up, Adrian stood with his hands in his pockets, contemplating his patient. "From the point of view of treating the poor sod, I'd say the sooner we can get him used to the idea that not everyone that touches him is out to hurt him, the better. Assuming that he does survive, and grow stronger, I don't think it would be very helpful if I had to hold him down in order to change a dressing. Would you agree, sir?"

Dumbledore nodded. "He seems at least to 'get' the idea that Miss Granger isn't doing anything actively harmful to him, and in the long run that may help him to realize that his situation has improved."

McGonagall, still looking very pale and unsteady, temporarily transfigured the pillow into a shallow bowl and Hermione sat by the bedside and washed her former professor's hair, slowly and gently, talking to him in a low voice until his eyes actually lost some of that awful, frozen look and drifted half-shut. She thought that, if he had been able to do so, he would have fallen asleep as she smoothed the coconut-scented shampoo into his black hair and then rinsed it away, taking with it the last of the blood and filth of Voldemort's stronghold.

A simple drying charm got rid of the water, from his hair and from the bowl, which duly became a clean pillow again. Cleaned and combed out as it was now, they could see that his hair had grown considerably while he was a captive, but cutting the mats out had left it thinned and feathered. Hermione privately thought that the effect was quite good, then wondered at herself for her frivolity in thinking it, when the man was so very badly hurt.

Dumbledore, trying to monitor his patient's mind with a light touch, looked at McGonagall and smiled faintly, the bare beginnings of his trademark twinkle showing in his eyes. "That _is_ better. At least, he can feel that he is clean, and that he has a pillow, and he has at least a vague idea that neither of those eventualities would be likely to occur in Tom's tender care."

* * *

**Author's note:**

Paper sutures and cotton buds are known in the U.S. as steri-strips and Q-tips. A slicker-brush is a pad covered in fine, soft, slightly bent wires, normally used for grooming short-coated pets but also useful for raking hairs out of the brushes used on long-coated ones.

Live maggots, known euphemistically as "larval therapy," not only clean necrosed tissue out of a wound but also mop up bacteria, reducing or even preventing infection. Dr. W.S. Baer, who made the first scientific studies on the medicinal use of maggots, first became interested in them after treating two World War I soldiers who had lain on the battlefield for seven days, untreated, with abdominal wounds and compound fractures heaving with maggots, and when they were finally rescued their wounds were found to be healthy and healing nicely.

Although Hagrid tells his Care of Magical Creatures class that adult unicorns can only be approached by girls, not boys, this is clearly not entirely true; Hagrid himself is able to approach them and so is Ollivander, who speaks of having personally plucked a hair from the tail of a 17 hand (5'8" at the shoulder) male unicorn, although the unicorn was very annoyed about it. Tradition says that a unicorn will come peacefully to a virgin, but doesn't specify the gender.

This chapter has been slightly edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to reduce the degree to which Dumbledore thinks of Snape as having been his friend prior to his disappearance.


	5. 03 Speaking in Tongues

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**3: SPEAKING IN TONGUES**

Those of them who had the appetite to eat at all, ate in Poppy Pomfrey's office - not wanting to torment Snape with the smell of the food which he had been denied for so long, and which was still out of his reach because of the gut wound. Adrian ate like a horse and washed it down with beer in true medical student style; nobody else had much appetite, apart from Bill Weasley, who chewed his way steadily through five plates of sandwiches without taking his eyes off the parchment he was working on, covered as it was with shifting, unpleasantly alive lines in a medley of hideous colours.

When he was too tired to focus any more Bill stepped through the fire and went to sleep at his parents' house, but the rest of the team slept on narrow beds in the hospital wing's main ward - even Hermione Granger, who was unable to face the idea of spending the night with her dorm mates, listening to them exclaiming in horror over the discovery of Snape's mutilated corpse, and not being able to tell them that he was still (barely) alive.

For Snape himself, of course, sleep was an unattainable paradise, but someone sat with him the whole night, taking turns so that there were always two people there to watch him and to guard him, and to do their best to comfort him. It was important to keep him as quiet as possible, not only for basic humanitarian reasons but because his fear and distress were likely to push his metabolic rate even higher than the chemical burns were already doing. Poppy and Adrian split the night between them, two hours on and two hours off, so that one or other of them was awake at all times and was on hand to check the patient's electrolytes and moisten his mouth every half-hour.

Adrian, who was a morning person and still young enough to go without sleep without falling over, awoke revoltingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, made sure that his patient was fairly stable and at least tolerably comfortable, and then lay on his stomach on the hearth, with his head in The Burrow and his heels at Hogwarts, 'phoning Glasgow Royal Infirmary to tell them he had the 'flu' and wouldn't be in for a few days.

"At least my flatmate is away till Monday night, so there won't be any questions about where I disappeared to when I was supposed to be ill. You complain about 'primitive Muggle methods,'" he said, sitting up and dusting the soot off his jacket, "but this is ridiculous. Why don't you have a small, portrait-sized fireplace set into the wall at head height, so you can talk through it without lying on the bloody floor?"

"That's... a very good idea, actually," Dumbledore said tiredly. "I'll look into it when... things are a bit less hectic." His eyes were downcast, watching Snape's bone-thin, nail-less hand where it lay limply in his own much wider grip; though his own hand was equally grotesque, still withered and blackened by the effects of a magical accident over a year before. "He seems... quieter. Is that a good sign - or a bad one?"

"On the whole, I think it's a good one. Of course he must be appallingly tired, poor bastard, and his metabolic rate is climbing, which was inevitable; but his heart seems fairly steady and he's not bubbling much. On the whole I'm quite pleased with him."

"Addy, do you - is he going to live?" Hermione asked quietly.

"I can't promise you that, Thothlet," he replied seriously; "but he has a fighting chance."

Hermione looked at Snape's face, as white as the pillow he lay on. It was true he looked a little less distressed and frantic this morning - but so very ill and tired, and so empty, that it was difficult to imagine him fighting anything ever again. Feeling pale and sniffly, she leaned against Harry's increasingly broad chest. He put his arms round her, patted her awkwardly and said "There, there" vaguely. People-skills were not his long suit. "Why does he call you 'Thothlet,' anyway?"

She sniffled. "It's his idea of a joke - Hermione, Little Hermes, Thothlet, right?" Wrong: Harry just looked blank.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I just want to try something," Adrian said softly as the unicorn approached. "Can you get him to - to lower his horn here, by Professor Snape's arm?"

"All right," Harry replied equally softly. Somehow the presence of the unicorn made them both feel as hushed as if they were in church, and Adrian remembered vaguely that in Mediaeval legend the unicorn was a Christ-symbol, among other things. The boy rested his hand under the unicorn's bearded jaw and tugged down very gently, and the great beast dipped his head.

Adrian swiftly disconnected the coupling between the IV bag and its catheter and allowed a trickle of blood to flow out over the spiral swirl of horn, but the world remained unshaken, and when Madam Pomfrey compared the "before" and "after" readings there was no change.

"Would you expect one, though? Maybe it - he - just didn't find any more poisons to remove."

"But there are at least some here, you see. Antibiotics don't kill off all the bacteria instantly, by any means: it'll take days to clear the infection fully, even with the maggots to help him. There's a fresh build-up of toxins even since last night, and certainly some things which shouldn't be there, whether or not they're exactly toxins - creatins due to renal failure, myoglobin from where he's still breaking down what's left of his muscles... it's something to do with the method of access, isn't it? All right." He took up his scalpel and re-opened the same vein in Snape's leg - already fully sealed by magic, though the skin over it was raw and unhealed. The unicorn dipped his horn into the wound with a nod of acquiescence, the world shuddered around them and made itself new, and the poisons in Snape's blood dropped back to harmless levels.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"What was that about?" Harry asked with interest, pausing on his way down to breakfast.

"I thought - well, topologically speaking," with a nod to Hermione, "just bringing the horn into contact with a continuous flow of blood - I mean a trickle, not discrete drops - that ought to be the same as dipping it into a wound, and it would save cutting Severus again. Not that he can feel it at present, I know, but even so... I don't understand why it didn't work."

Dumbledore coughed gently. "Symbolically-speaking, the unicorn is an, ah, male symbol, and the act of dipping the horn into a container..."

"Topologically-speaking, it shouldn't make any difference."

"Magically-speaking, though, it evidently does."

Adrian scratched his short frizz of hair. "I don't like that, much," he admitted. "That makes it sound like a symbolic sexual act, leik, and when the man's already been abused..."

"That is one way of looking at it," the Headmaster agreed, "and a highly unpleasant way. But the unicorn symbolizes everything healthy and clean and good in male sexuality, so you could see it, symbolically, as taking away the - poison of what was done to him, as well as the more directly physical poisons. That is certainly how I will explain it to him, if he queries it later."

"You think, then, that he will live to query it?" asked Professor Flitwick sombrely. The little man was one of the few people Adrian had ever met who made him feel tall - his face almost on a level with the patient's as he stood by the bedside. Not that there was much of an advantage in that, since Snape continued to stare blindly at the ceiling, too far sunk in exhaustion and misery to recognize his colleague.

"I don't know," Adrian answered honestly. "The spell which was keeping him alive wore off about twelve hours ago and he's still with us, which is promising; but even though I'm feeding him through the drip the burns are causing him to use up protein faster than I can feed him - which means he's still basically digesting what little is left of his own body. The combination of burns, malnutrition and a gut-wound is a nightmare, and even if I operated right now, by normal - sorry, Muggle - methods it would still be a couple of days before I could feed him much by mouth and by that point..."

"So it all depends on Bill Weasley breaking the curses which are preventing him from being healed?"

"Yes. Poppy tells me that if I operate and give her clean, lined-up lesions to work on she will be able to heal his gut in less than half an hour, once the curse is lifted, and heal most of the burns in a day or two. Then I can get at least a little proper food into him, to help him cope with the side-effects of the burns, and - even so it could be touch and go, but a lot better than what he's facing now."

The little man nodded competently, trying to pretend that there weren't tears in his eyes. "In which case, I will cancel all my classes until further notice, and assist Bill in any way I can."

"Thank you, Filius," Minerva said quietly. "Severus needs all the help he can get. None of us wishes to leave him - we will have to tell the students that you, and I, and the Headmaster are all indisposed."

"Seems like we're all lying about our health," Adrian said with a grin. "But I'm disappointed about the unicorn business. I really, really don't want to keep on just slicing into him like that, especially once the anti-bleeding spell has been lifted, but it seems the unicorn needs to put his horn actually into a vessel. If the - if he continues to need dialysis-by-unicorn for more than a few days I'll have to look at putting in a port-cath - that's a sort of a little... flying-saucer-shaped flask an inch or so across which fits under his skin and connects to a vein - or maybe a shunt. That's... well, you make a surgical channel that draws off a little blood from an artery and feeds it back into an otherwise minor vein, to increase the blood-flow so you can get access to a largish flow of blood without the risk of cutting into a major vessel."

"What are the advantages..." Poppy Pomfrey began, when the fire flared and Bill Weasley stepped into the room, accompanied by a short, plump middle-aged woman with untidy red hair who crossed the floor to Snape's bedside in a few strides and began talking to him in a fierce, cajoling undertone while tears streamed down her face unheeded.

It was only 8am and already the private room was becoming distinctly crowded - and it suddenly became a lot more so when the door flung open and Ron Weasley bounded in with a cry of "Hi, Hermione, hi, Bill, Harry said he - oh, hi Mum." With the innocent enthusiasm of a red setter he more or less hurled himself at his mother and that, as it proved, was disastrous. Last night, Snape might have been too dazed with agony to take in anything which happened around him but now that he was more comfortable he was also much more alert.

Adrian would hardly have believed that the man could move at all, paralysed from the chest down and as wasted as he was, but weak as he was he was also very light, and before he had come to such starvation he had had the wiry but powerful upper-body musculature of someone who had spent a lifetime chopping and stirring. At Ron's sudden, violently active appearance in his field of view he somehow found a last remnant of strength in his arm and shoulders, heaved himself up in a paroxysm of dread and threw himself sideways, ripping the drip from his arm and dislodging some of the hydrogel dressings as he landed half on the bed and half in Minerva McGonagall's arms.

She, automatically, took hold of him and tried to steady him but the touch of human hands, holding him, was anything but reassuring. In a matter of two or three seconds they went from a relatively peaceful scene, with the medical team discussing their options around a patient who was, despite the circumstances, reasonably calm and stable, to one of utter chaos. Snape shook and gasped in McGonagall's grip, attempting to shield himself with an arm which trailed blood as she tried to wrestle him back onto the bed, Flitwick and Dumbledore got in each other's way in a state of infectious panic and nearly fell over each other and the red-headed woman shouted murder at her son, which only made things worse, especially when he began to argue.

Adrian surprized himself by drawing himself up to his full height, such as it was, and bellowing "Everybody - SHUT. UP." It was gratifyingly effective. Ignoring everyone else, he hurried to his patient, who was shivering desperately and shaking his head from side to side in frantic denial.

"Noo, man, ye knaa me, leik" Adrian said quietly, allowing his accent free rein - but somebody had told him Snape was a northerner himself, from somewhere outside Manchester. "Yee divvent knaa me nyame yet, ahm thinking, but ahm Adrian an' you're Severus, reet?" As he went on speaking the soft, singsong Geordie accent seemed to penetrate Snape's hysterical fear and he gradually stopped trembling, until Adrian was able to lift him very carefully out of McGonagall's arms and back onto the bed. The houseman fussed the dressings back into place, inserted a fresh IV line an inch above the original site and then touched Snape's face gently in reassurance. He was touched himself to feel the man turn his head slightly and lean against his hand.

Clearing his throat, he muttered "That's done for his breathing, leik - you can hear him bubbling. I'll need to get the mask on him but they can be a bit claustrophobic. Or a cannula - "

"No need" McGonagall said, shaken but crisp. To Adrian's fascination she shaped the air itself, it seemed, into a mask which had no substance and no sensation except a vague tingling against the skin, and yet was air-tight enough to direct the oxygen from the cylinder into Snape's gasping mouth. If he had somehow stumbled into a Science Fiction rather than a Fantasy story, Adrian would have called it a force-field. It was better than a regular oxygen mask, as well as more comfortable: it accommodated itself to the patient's torn-open cheeks without difficulty, and would not obstruct Adrian from repairing the same. That should be at least marginally possible, now: despite fluid-loss from the burns, the drip was doing its job, and Snape was far less severely dehydrated than he had been the night before. Unpleasantly dry and sticky though his mouth still was his tongue felt to the touch like a real tongue now, not the sort made from shoe-leather, and his skin was much less tightly contracted.

After a brief consultation Poppy and Adrian sat themselves down on either side of Snape, talking to him quietly and steadily. It was difficult to know what if anything got through; sudden movement or loud voices made him flinch and shiver at best, but when they tried standing back from him, to see whether he would be easier in his mind if he thought he was alone, he actually shook worse than before. Calm voices seemed to soothe him a little, to make him think about the state of calmness, even if he still more than half expected the speakers to harm him.

Very calmly and quietly, then, Poppy and Adrian began to tape the gashes in Snape's cheeks, pulling the cut edges together and best they could, for the moment, and holding them in place with paper sutures. As they turned his face from side to side to access the cuts he shivered with low-grade apprehension, expecting something terrible but too weary to panic before the event. Once again, Adrian's singsong, humorous northern voice seemed to take away some of the sting of fear.

And after that - after that there was nothing to be done but maintenance. As the hours crawled on Adrian checked Snape's blood and urine and swabbed his mouth with lukewarm chamomile over and over again, changed the burn-dressings as they became choked and dank with plasma, and watched his metabolic-rate rise steadily. It was not a simple matter of a fever which should be cooled; his body needed to be warm to cope with the burns and yet the extensive damage to his skin (after some complex mental calculation concerning the amount of surface-area Snape had lost with his limbs, Adrian estimated it at around five per cent third degree burns, thirty-five per cent second degree and twenty per cent first degree) meant that he was unable to regulate his own temperature and he tended still to be too cold, rather than too hot. And then digested what little there was left of his muscles to digest, in a vain attempt to raise his own temperature. Adrian and Poppy did what they could to keep the man warm, but he felt that he was running the Red Queen's race - scrabbling frantically to stay in the same place - and failing even at that.

The one bright spot was that the maggots and the antibiotics between them had significantly reduced the infection, in Snape's wounds and in his blood. Infection might have made him warm - but the risks were far greater than the benefits, and the maggots were themselves a good if bizarre source of heat.

Adrian and Minerva had at least managed to solve the problem of the unicorn horn, by making a tiny cup-shaped funnel - little bigger than a thimble - which could be fitted onto the end of the IV catheter. Even a few drops of blood, rising into this symbolical chalice, were enough for the unicorn to dip his highly symbolical horn into. But even the horned and cloven-hoofed stallion's twice-daily ministrations were just - maintenance, and all Adrian could do was try to hold back the inevitable as Snape steadily deteriorated.

The people who really were doing something - the people he envied - were Bill and Filius, isolated in their own little private world, arguing and gesticulating over their piles of parchment. One or other of them was frequently at Snape's bedside, drawing glowing patterns in the air above him with the tip of a wand and then analyzing the results - although they quickly learned not to point their wands at him too directly, if they didn't want to reduce him to a state of trembling anticipatory dread. Adrian was quite glad he didn't know enough about their magic to be able to speculate in too much detail about what the man's captors might have done with their pointing wands, to induce such absolute terror of a piece of wood. Dumbledore had been obliging enough to explain the effects of something called Cruciatus and that was quite enough knowledge to be going on with.

Also, he was trying very hard not to think about the raw-looking, half-healed scar on Bill Weasley's cheek - and especially not about Poppy's cheerful comment that she had been unable to heal it properly because the injury had been inflicted by a werewolf, during the fight in which Snape himself had been captured.

He hoped quite desperately to be able to pull Snape through this. He realized that a tendency to become so emotionally invested in a critical case was the royal road to a nervous breakdown, professionally speaking, but the idea that the man could suffer such agonies for so long and then die without even properly understanding that he was among friends was lacerating. But Snape was so emaciated and frail that unless Bill and Filius could break the curses which prevented him from being healed, his chances of fighting through the side-effects of the burns were nearly as slim as he was. And Bill and Filius, judging from their increasingly heated and frustrated exchanges, were getting nowhere fast - even if Adrian understood even less of their muttered conversations about force-nodes and reciprocal bindings than they understood about electrolytes and ECGs.

And all the time, Snape lay drifting in delirium as his body fed on itself. Since sleep was still not an option, yet, somebody sat with him at all times, speaking to him gently or just quietly keeping him company, but nothing seemed to reach him. The best that could be said was that he shook less when he had calm company than he did if he was left alone, but against that any unexpected touch or any large or sudden movement was enough to start a shuddering fit. For the most part he lay quietly with his white, ruined face turned to the side and pressed into the pillow, open-eyed and relentlessly awake, his breath doled out in shallow, careful gasps.

As the drip did its job and his body gradually rehydrated, they began to see tears, sometimes, rolling silently down his face and leaking into the half-closed gashes which slit his cheeks to the gums; but even when something disturbed him into that desperate shivering his expression was unchanged, frozen into a sort of patient misery. It was that patience which seemed the most disturbing and unnatural thing, in a man who had once been so very hot and hasty, but all that Albus Dumbledore's Legilimency could read in him was a vast cold unhappiness and a desperate longing for sleep. That, and the glimmerings of awareness that no new tortures were being inflicted on him at present, and of relief that this was so - a thin enough straw to cling to, but the older man would take any positive sign he could get; anything which might suggest that Snape might still have a rational mind, buried somewhere under the burden of exhaustion, starvation and pain.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I have it!" exclaimed Flitwick, squeaky with excitement. "This part - here - and this - see this changing line? This has to be undone in Parseltongue!"

"Good God - I think you might be right! But in that case these words - _these_ - have to be taken out of the Latin and put into - what? What's the next one in the sequence - Norman French?"

"It certainly looks like it. That will abduct the recursive loop - "

Adrian was glad that they evidently knew what they were talking about, even if he didn't. At least it sounded as if progress was being made. As the two curse-breakers went into an intense huddle he spoke quietly to Poppy. "It must be getting on for eighty hours, now, since he was - cut, assuming they cut him just before they dumped him, and the maggots will have got to him pretty quickly, so... three days is the usual time to leave a larval dressing, and the wound is probably as clean as it's going to get. I'm going to go ahead and operate. It sounds as if those two are going to be ready soon - but if the worst happens and they still can't break the curses - well, the sooner I can get the poor sod's gut working again the better chance he has of surviving, and now that the wound's been debrided it should heal in a day or two well enough to start him on liquids by mouth, even without magic."

"What will you need?"

"Well - he can't feel any pain there and he won't bleed much, so he won't go into shock and we don't need anaesthetic - just keep him still for me. I need those magic gloves the same as for dressing the burns, and can you make me a mask the same way? Disposable scalpel, sutures..." They went through the list together, quiet and businesslike, and Adrian hoped that the fact that he was sweating with nerves didn't show. His first unsupervized operation! At least the glove-field would prevent the scalpel from sliding out of his sweaty palms. But really - it was not a hugely complicated procedure, and being asked to operate on someone who was guaranteed not to haemorrhage was a gift. "I feel a bit guilty about the maggots, leik - they've done a good job."

Poppy gave him a bemused look. "If you like, I'll send them all down to Hagrid and he can put them on one of his dead stoats."

"Of course," he said chattily, "maggots are bad news insofar as they mean that necrosed tissue is present. But they also mean that soon it won't be."

For this one, wanting no distractions, they had to ask the laymen - the civilians, Adrian privately thought of them - to wait in Poppy's office. Albus, Minerva - even Hermione, who fretted through every lesson and ran to the infirmary at every break, to make sure Snape was still breathing. Adrian gathered that it was probably the first time in history that the girl had been late with a homework assignment, but all the staff knew the reason and would be lenient with her.

Poppy used a spell called Immobilis to fix Snape in place, so that even if something alarmed him he would make no sudden movements. Adrian was afraid that feeling himself held down would be alarming to Snape in itself but he kept talking, soothing - feeling slightly foolish for informing someone who was mazed by pain and exhaustion and probably far past being able to understand anything that was said to him, but he thought that the tone of voice, the being spoken to like a rational person, would be reassuring even if the words were meaningless. At any rate Snape's eyes widened and his by now rather laboured breathing became fast and tense when he was locked in place, and then slowed and steadied again as the surgeon's placid voice rolled on, assuring him that help was at hand, that no further harm would come to him, that he was to be made better...

Without the maggots, it could be seen (and indeed smelled) that the wound was indeed very much cleaner now. "What did I tell you?" Adrian said rapturously, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. "Lovely and pink."

Poppy was rather less sanguine; she tried not to look too openly horrified, and not to mutter about "Muggle barbarians" where Adrian could hear her, but the sight of the houseman cutting out several inches of shredded intestine with a hand-held knife and then re-joining the cut ends with an actual needle and thread proved almost too much for her even though there was, as expected, very little blood (and very little of anything else that might contaminate the wound, since the man's gut had been emptied by starvation long since). She was aware that, ironically, Snape himself would probably not be shocked, if he could understand what was happening to him - but he was made of tougher material than herself, she thought, and was capable - had been capable, four months and forever ago - of taking a scholarly interest in almost anything.

The afternoon crawled by, punctuated by occasional anxious, polite enquiries from Albus. Taking out two sections of gut which were damaged beyond reasonable repair and mending several smaller nicks and punctures was fairly simple work, and Adrian thought privately that there were certain advantages to Poppy's near-total lack of understanding of the real - that is, the Muggle world. At least she didn't understand the term "superglue" well enough to be alarmed by it - but really, cyanoacrylates were where it was at, as far as mending minor lesions went. The really difficult and fiddly part, the thing that took up most of the afternoon, was easing open the adhesions caused by months of beatings.

And all the long afternoon Snape lay frozen in place, his skin cold to the touch and his eyes dark and dilated with fear as the two medics spoke to him quietly, doing what they could to bear him through it. It came as a great relief to all when the job was finally done - and a very neat job it was, even Poppy had to admit to herself that the final result wasn't nearly as gruesome-looking as she had expected, just a long line of close stitching up the midline of her friend's belly - a great relief when she could loosen the binding spell and allow Snape to move again, even if it was only to turn his head fretfully.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The sounds which issued from Harry Potter's mouth were terrifying - a vast, low, rustling hiss which made Adrian feel as if a _Tyrannosaurus rex_ was breathing down the back of his neck. The boy opened his mouth again with a sound like a steam kettle, rattling and boiling, and Bill Weasley said something deep-voiced and ancient under the harsh, throaty whisper of the Parseltongue. Filius Flitwick chimed in, high and fast, drawing his wand swiftly across his colleague's body and Snape arched up off the bed in spasm, the discharge of magic causing his muscles to fire even with his spine severed, and cried out harshly. There was a sense as if something unseen and enormous had just clapped its hands with the room and everything in it in between them, crushed down flat and then springing back again in one fast compressive jolt, and then things were their proper shape again and Snape was collapsed back against the pillows, gasping in shock.

The first thing, the very first thing, was to introduce an analgesic potion in with the drip, and the tears ran down Poppy's face unheeded when the diagnostic spell informed her that at last her friend was in no serious pain, and she saw some of the desperate strain ease out of his narrow face, to be replaced by profound relief and something almost like relaxation. Quickly, she started the healing-process on the gut-wound and on the damage caused by the rapes - there were some things which even her strongest pain-relieving potion could do little to combat, and a fresh surgical incision in the gut was one of them. Later, when the healing was well underway, she would repair his spine and let him feel his lower body again - though she knew that even with all her best efforts he was still going to be stiff and sore for a few days. But to leave his spine severed as it was for much longer could result in some degree of permanent damage.

The burns, next - not so much to stop the pain, important as that was, but to end the fluid-loss and the racing metabolism which were putting such a strain on Snape's system. Breathless, drowsy and cold, the man lay limply across the bed, unprotesting as she rolled him over onto his front to access his injuries. Then the snapped wrist - a very simple, quick little job and she wished that she could as easily mend the limbs which were missing, but dealing with amputations was a whole other issue.

It was time, finally, for her and Adrian to do what they could to restore her friend's ruined face - that narrow, beaky blade of a face which was as dear to her as a son's, though Severus would never believe it. The sweeping prow of his nose had been broken so many times already that one more was hardly worth worrying about, and the mottled burn across his right temple and the slash across his left brow were simple matters, easily dealt with, although both would leave a scar. Even the broken teeth, she would be able to repair unaided. But the gashes which split his cheeks in a nightmare parody of a smile were another matter altogether. If she healed them just as they were, even held together by paper sutures, he would be appallingly scarred in zigzag, puckered welts. And he had never been beautiful, God knew, but she knew how psychologically damaging facial scarring could be, and wanted to spare him as much stress as she could.

She winced as the Muggle surgeon used actual needles to introduce local anaesthetic all around the slashes - then used her wand to clear away the paper sutures and shave the granulated top layer off the cut edges of the wounds, leaving raw surfaces which could be encouraged to grow together. She didn't like to think how long her friend had been left suffering that particular torment, for the edges to have sealed over so thoroughly.

The young houseman worked with a steady hand, drawing the edges of the cuts together as smoothly and accurately as possible and then fixing them in place with stitches for long enough for Poppy to follow after, sealing the wounds, although they still left straight, raw scars across Snape's hollow cheeks. They had half expected him to react badly to being handled so commandingly and to need to be sedated, but in fact he lay limp and already at least three-quarters asleep in Adrian's competent hands, permitting his face to be turned this way and that way, his mouth opened and fingers inserted between cheek and gums without protest or apparent distress.

When work on the second cut was almost completed Adrian nodded to the attendant house-elf. "Fetch me a glass of cold milk, please - goats' for preference." Without being asked, he smiled a rather harassed smile at Poppy, and at Albus and Minerva where they hovered anxiously on the side-lines. "He's not significantly dehydrated any more - the drip's taken care of that - but his mouth is still very raw and a little milk will ease it and give his stomach something to think about while he sleeps. I want to get him started on a protein feed later tonight, or at worst first thing tomorrow. If you hadn't healed him, if it was just the surgery, I'd only give him clear fluids at first but since you _have_ healed him he should be able to handle milk and it will help elevate his phosphates. But goat-milk is more digestible than cows'."

When the house-elf returned, with a small but self-important flourish, Adrian slid his arm behind Snape's shoulders and lifted him up gently, and coaxed him to the surface just enough to take in a sip of milk. The man was beyond even swallowing of his own volition, and the young surgeon had to stroke his throat like a cat's until the milk went down, but he managed to get him to take about a dessertspoonful; and if the patient didn't actually smile he did at least look slightly less unhappy, as if he realized that something positive was happening. Before his head was laid back on the pillow it was clear he was already asleep, but Adrian stood looking down at him thoughtfully for some time afterwards.

* * *

**Author's note:**

Since Mad-Eye Moody has been left with a wooden leg and an artificial eye, and Peter Pettigrew had his chopped-off hand replaced with a hand of metal rather than flesh, and the previous Care of Magical Creatures professor left "to enjoy more time with his remaining limbs," and Dumbledore is left stuck with a withered arm rather than cutting it off and growing a new one, I assume that replacing bits which are actually missing, rather than simply damaged, is something which wizarding medicine finds very difficult.

This is complicated by the fact that in _Deathly Hallows_ the Weasleys think that they would have been able to regrow George's severed ear, were it not for some special quality in the curse that severed it. It is possible that Moody's leg was severed by just such a curse, and that Voldemort could have regrown Peter a hand of flesh but chose not to. Yet Professor Kettleburn's limbs were surely just torn off by some creature. Obviously there are circumstances under which missing limbs cannot be regrown - or perhaps they never can be, and George's ear could have been regrown only because an ear is quite a simple thing without bones, tendons or muscles.

When the Greeks took over and Hellenized Ancient Egypt, the Egyptian god of wisdom and learning, Thoth, was merged and equated with the Greek god Hermes.

This chapter has been slightly edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to reduce the degree to which Dumbledore thinks of Snape as having been his friend prior to his disappearance, and to show people tending to think of him more as "Dumbledore" than as "Albus".


	6. 04 Waking Dreams

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**4: WAKING DREAMS**

"I don't want to have to wake him up when he obviously needs sleep so badly. At the same time, he's starved to the bone and I really don't want to leave him dependent on nothing but a drip for nourishment any longer, especially with the demands the burns are still making on his system. But there seems no point in setting up a central line when, in fact, the sooner we get his digestive system working on some actual food the better - so I'm going to put in a naso-gastric tube, at least until he wakes up naturally."

"A _what_?"

"It means I feed a tube up his nose - God knows, there's plenty of room for it - and down the back of his throat into his stomach, so we can get small amounts of food into him directly without having to wake him up to swallow. Don't worry: I'll teach you how to use it."

Poppy looked horrified. "I - I realize that Muggles have to do the best they can with - mechanical measures, but even so, surely this is... he's a man, not a, a ninjun or whatever you call those things. There must be another way, surely."

"Are you able to magic small amounts of food directly into his stomach accurately enough to be sure of not injuring him? No?" He tipped the sleeping man's head forward gently and prepared to insert the lubricated tip of the tube. "In that case, kindly get on with your job and let me get on with mine."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

By a minor miracle, they managed to bring the patient up to full hydration without any more major seizures. By the following day - the fifth day after his dramatically horrible return to Hogwarts, including the day and a half he had spent lying in undiscovered agony in the students' Potions-supplies storeroom - Snape seemed stable enough that Adrian felt safe to return to work, though he still planned to return to the school every evening, as soon as his hospital shift was over, and spend the night there, so that he could check on his patient at 7am and 9pm every day. "Bob - my flatmate - is going to wonder what I'm up to, but I'll tell him I'm staying with Immie's little sister and some friends of hers, helping them out with something. That's not not true, is it?"

They were using the Floo as little as possible, now, for security reasons, so in the morning Adrian made the brisk seven-minute walk to the Hogwarts gates where he was met by Tonks, in all her pink-haired glory, ready to Apparate him almost to the doors of Glasgow Royal Infirmary. The method of transition was appealingly reminiscent of a _Star Trek_ Transporter but the sensation made him slightly sea-sick.

Replaced back into his own world, he wondered whether the whole thing had been some weird hallucination - maybe he really had had the 'flu' and the rest of it was just a fever dream. He wasn't sure whether he hoped that it was real or that it wasn't. If it was real then so was Snape's dreadful suffering - but so were love and care and magic and wonder and his own dazzling maiden performance, definitely worthy of Hawkeye Pierce although he thought it as probably shouldn't.

But at half past eight in the evening there was Tonks, waiting to yank him through a hole in reality much too small for him, and walk him across the green grounds in the darkness, watching the many-fingered folly of the castle's roof-line rearing against the stars. And there was the infirmary, and Minerva McGonagall coming to greet him looking reasonably cheerful, so that he felt safe to ask "So how's Sleeping Beauty, then?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Out cold, was the invariable answer. Adrian had heard the expression "sleeping like the dead," but he hadn't seen the thing demonstrated until now. On the whole, though, he thought that it was probably a good thing - not only because Snape had four months'-worth of lost sleep and of overwhelming physical and mental exhaustion to make up for, but because unconsciousness was known to accelerate healing. Rather than try to stir Snape out of his profound slumber, it seemed better and safer to teach Poppy how to use the naso-gastric tube, and let the man sleep for as long as he needed to.

He had already slept through having his spinal cord mended - usefully so, since Poppy had had to immobilize him for twelve hours in case any sudden shift of position disrupted the smooth re-joining of the nerve paths. She had hardly needed to bother: the man might have been a stone for all the movement he made.

In the event, Poppy got used to using the tube very rapidly, although it still made her tut under her breath. She learned to prop Snape into a partial sitting-position - that, at least, was a simple matter of transfiguring the shape of the bed - aspirate a little fluid to make sure the tube was still sitting correctly in his stomach, and hang up the bag with the liquid feed, warmed to room temperature; basic sugars on the evening of the operation, and then a special formula mix which Tonks Accio'd from the hospital stores on Adrian's instructions.

Adrian told her that it was possible to attach the bag to a pump, which would deliver the feed continuously and as slowly as was desirable. But apart from the usual difficulty in getting Muggle electrical devices to work in a standing magical field, it made the whole thing sound even more like priming an engine and Poppy preferred to feel that she was - despite the paraphernalia of tubes and bags and stands and syringes - still feeding and caring for her friend with her own hands. It was something that they had shared and understood in each other after all, when he had had mind enough to do more than tremble and weep - when he was her friend and colleague, her bold brittle almost-son whom she had fretted over since he was eleven - that preference for doing things with your own hands, rather than just a casual wave of a wand. Something they had both shared, eccentrically, with Hagrid - the knowledge that the touch of hands was almost an act of worship, of reverence, whether it was for the beauty of a potion truly made or the intricate marvel of a living being.

A barely living being, in Snape's case, but at least he obeyed Minerva's strict instructions and somehow kept on breathing steadily in and out. The patient's stomach was so shrunken that at first Poppy had to introduce the feed a few cc's at a time, at half-hour intervals; but over the course of a couple of days she was able to get him up to the equivalent of a mouthful or two at a time, at least. It still meant that he was only taking the equivalent of two or three bowls of soup a day, which was little enough for a man who had been, before he was maimed, over six feet tall. But his metabolism was dropping back down to normal now that the burns were almost healed, and the level of myoglobin in his urine was tailing off, indicating that he was no longer trying to digest his own muscles. Adrian assured her that the special feed-mix which Tonks had purloined from the Muggle hospital was especially nourishing: so the little he could absorb was enough that she could at least be sure he would no longer lose weight, if he did not gain it, and Adrian thought it safe to discontinue feeding him _via_ the IV drip; although he continued to administer antibiotics and extra water by that route.

Every day, she and Adrian checked the patient's blood-sugar levels with a diagnostic spell, to make sure that his system was coping with the feed and his insulin-levels were within normal parameters, and administered extra insulin if they were not. And every day that passed, Snape remained asleep - deeply, profoundly asleep. When they handled him, to salve or clean or feed him, his head lolled back limply and his arm hung loose and flail. If it hadn't been for the diagnostic spells Poppy would have thought he was in an actual coma, but to her relief the spells showed that he was simply burnt out with exhaustion and weakness. Sometimes she sat and held his hand and talked to him in a low voice, reassuring him that he was in a safe place and that nothing bad was waiting for him when he woke, but his famine-sunken eyes remained closed, thick black lashes lying like smudges of soot in the hollowed-out sockets.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

After five days of this death-like slumber, Snape finally began to surface - but in no very easy or peaceful fashion. Shivers chased each other across his skin as his eyelids flickered, and when Poppy caught his hand and tried to talk him to the surface he made a soft, frightened noise and flinched away from her - having only bad expectations of what he might be waking to. His eyes when he finally opened them were wild and lost, empty of recognition, and it was only Adrian's return a few hours later which finally ended his tight, miserable shivering.

Waking up was certainly a positive advance, medically speaking; especially since it meant that he could now - with a lot of gentle coaxing - eat something a little more solid than the fine puree required by the naso-gastric tube. Even if it was only thick soup and porridge. Feeding him was an emotional minefield, since he was still almost too weak to swallow and his stomach was long out of practice at handling anything with fibre in it, so that he still needed to be fed little and often. In the eagerness of his hunger and his long deprivation he would try to bolt down whatever was offered, as if he thought it might be taken away in a second, but if he ate more than a mouthful or two at a time he immediately threw up, and then shook worse than before. They left the tube in for a few more days, to make sure enough nourishment was getting into him, but that only made him the more likely to gag - and it didn't help that the antibiotics had killed off most of his surviving gut-flora. Adrian had a difficult and frustrating time of it trying to explain to Poppy, Albus and Minerva what live yoghurt was and why it might aid Snape's digestion - they seemed to think it was the kind of thing Hagrid might keep in a pen.

They had longed for Snape to be able to sleep, had seen it as an entirely positive goal; but the reality was that, rested, he was more sensitive to his environment and more easily panicked by the slightest disturbance, cringing in abject, trembling submission whenever anyone went near him, even to feed him, and whining in his throat like a dog - which at first seemed to be all the sound he could make, even now that Bill had lifted Silencio off him. Adrian's cheerful reassurance that hypervigilance was only to be expected in somebody so badly abused didn't make it any easier to deal with or to watch. Also, Snape still slept at least twenty hours out of twenty-four - and when he slept, he dreamed.

The first time he passed straight from deep sleep into howling anguish, clawing at his own skin and at anyone who came near him, Poppy Pomfrey and Albus, whose turn it was to sit with him, were close to panic themselves - but within a day they were viewing it as routine and Dumbledore, with his irritating ability to look on the bright side, was pleased that at least their patient was vocalizing now. He was even more pleased when Snape actually began to speak out of his tearing dreams, proving that his speech-centres were intact - even if it meant alternating between raging incoherent profanity and sobbing pleas for mercy.

Even if his voice was coarsened into a raven's croak, ruined by thirst and screaming. Even if he never spoke out of any conscious and voluntary desire to communicate, but only three parts asleep and in the grip of nightmare. Gradually, quietly, the members of staff, and several members of the Order of the Phoenix, came to pay their respects but all left saddened and frustrated, and many left in tears. Even Harry came, awkward, hushed and guilty, and went away again shaken and pale, after watching his quondam enemy gasping and crying as Professor McGonagall tried in vain to wake him.

Hermione Granger, briskly uptight though she generally was, proved to be surprizingly good with the worst of his distress. She happened to be present during one of these desperate episodes, helping Poppy Pomfrey to make up the healing potions which Snape himself would formerly have made, and she seemed more able than the three adults to enter into his nightmare delirium with him and change it for him - promising him both mercy and rest in a soft, steady voice, although there were tears in her eyes when she turned away from him. He for his part seemed to find her less threatening than his former colleagues, and even permitted her to hold his hand gently without shaking or pulling away.

The man had taken so many calming draughts and Dreamless Sleep potions over the years that they no longer had much of an effect when matched against outright panic, so that there was little Poppy or anyone could do to ward off the nightmares. The dreams were so scarring and horrible to watch, let alone to live through, that they even considered Obliviating some of the worst of Snape's memories - despite the ethical problems associated with tampering with a wizard's memory without his consent. But when Dumbledore so much as tried, delicately, to use Legilimency to identify particular traumas and triggers Snape shied away in panic and slammed down the shields which made him one of the best Occlumens on record, and Albus had no desire to commit another sort of rape by forcing the victim's mind. Even if he could do so, which was moot.

In any case, all that he could sense in Snape's memory before it closed to him was a vast long confused tangle of horror, a kaleidoscope of agonies coming so close on each other's heels that the sufferer could neither separate them nor name their source; of hands and mouths and genitals pawing at him, penetrating and choking him as he tried madly to push them away; of hands and knives, whittling him away to a useless stump of himself; of sobbing with thirst and hunger as other hands yanked his head back by the hair and forced him to drink things that were foul, or poisonous, or that left him twisting and howling in the grip of some magical distortion... There was no one thing, or even a dozen things, which could be taken out to disconnect the mechanism of panic; it was all too crazily interconnected, and taking it _all_ away - leaving Snape with no memory of being tortured or abused at all - would still leave his mind dragged down by a great cold soggy mass of fear and shame, without even understanding the reason. That might stop him dreaming so violently in the short term - but in the long term it would make his mental and physical injuries even harder to deal with.

The man was still as frail and light and brittle as a dry leaf, as if the slightest gust of wind could carry him off. Nevertheless Adrian was very pleased with his patent's progress - nightmares, shaking fits, vomiting and all. Nine days after Snape's return to Hogwarts, the young surgeon was able to remove the last of the hydrogel dressings from skin which looked - thanks to Poppy's ministrations - months rather than days healed, and the following day he felt it safe, finally, to thank the unicorn in all his wild dignity and his edgy grace, and send him on his way. There were plenty of tears then, when he was able to say with some confidence that Snape, weak and exhausted though he still was, was now significantly more likely to live than not. Filius Flitwick sniffled gently and tried to pretend he hadn't, Hermione stifled a sob, Albus and Minerva wept openly and Hagrid, predictably, cried like a village pump, until the tears dripped off the ends of his beard like falling stars.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Adrian still came every morning and evening to check on his patient, though he no longer felt it necessary to sleep on the premises overnight. He looked over the latest diagnostic list which Poppy Pomfrey handed him, and seemed reasonably pleased. "Has he shown any sign of recognition yet?"

"Not really, no." She sighed tiredly. "He seems marginally less frightened of Hermione Granger than he is of the rest of us, but that really isn't saying much. You seem to be the only person who doesn't terrify the life out of him."

"Is it because I'm black, do you think? Could it be that there aren't any black Death Eaters?"

Dumbledore shook his head. "I don't think it can be that. The Zabinis are black, and I'm fairly sure that the father at least will have taken part in..." He gestured wordlessly at Snape's terrible injuries.

"Must be the accent, then. Or maybe it's my excellent bedside manner... seriously, having a good bedside manner is a bit like being a horse-whisperer. I think we can take him off this tomorrow," he added, checking the drip. "That will give him the full ten days on antibiotics - and he's really taking enough fluids by mouth, now." He strolled to the other side of Snape's bed and stood looking down at him. "What do you think, then, man?" he asked softly. "Am I a Snape-whisperer?"

Snape opened his empty eyes and watched him warily, but he didn't shake or attempt to jerk away, even when the young surgeon sat down beside him and slid a firm but gentle hand behind his back to lift him up while Dumbledore adjusted both the pillows and the bed to prop him in the right position to be fed. If anything, he was so calm he looked hypnotised.

"Don't worry, it's not more yoghurt. A little chicken soup today," Adrian said coaxingly. "Jews always say it's the best thing for you and it really is great stuff - very good for your chest, leik. That's it - good man. A little more." He looked across at Madam Pomfrey. "Could you pass me my bag, please - and a clean glass?"

When he had his bag, he drew out a bottle of what looked to be a rather expensive red wine, and poured a moderate measure. "I have something nice for you" he murmured, but at that the patient broke away from his trance-like calmness and made a sharp, unhappy noise, turned his face away and did his best to curl up, hunching his shoulders miserably and keeping his mouth tightly closed.

"Not the right thing to say?" Adrian asked thoughtfully. "All right." He touched Snape's quaking shoulder lightly with the tips of his fingers. "It's all right, man. This is just me. I'm not going to hurt you - everything's going to be fine. Come on professor, come on, now - that's it. Good man. I really do have something for you that I think you'll like."

When he had managed to get the frightened man to turn to him again voluntarily, he held the glass to his lips. "That's it, now - just a little sip..." As Snape tasted the wine, his expression and his whole demeanour changed. He stopped trembling and relaxed back against the pillows, his eyes fixed on Adrian's face, breathing fast but looking, for the first time, cautiously intrigued rather than petrified. Adrian grinned at him. "That's all right, isn't it? A little more? Good man."

Afterwards he handed the rest of the bottle to Poppy, looking serious and thoughtful. "Keep it fresh - I'm guessing you'll have a method - and give him a mouthful or two after you feed him. Well, maybe not every time you feed him - I don't mean you to make him drunk, leik - but at least a couple of times a day."

"To aid his digestion?"

"Well - partly. But mainly - well, to let him know that he is still a... an adult, not just a collection of symptoms: a sophisticated person who used to sit down to a proper meal with wine, and will be able to again soon."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The taste of the wine, if nothing else, did seem to penetrate Snape's conditioned dread and register as Something Nice - as something that really _was_ nice, and not a cruel joke played on a starving man. It occurred to Hermione - who being Muggle-born and a daughter of dentists knew more about the treatment of long-term, intractable illness than most wizards could ever hope or fear to - that they should treat his dazed confusion and his inability to recognize his surroundings as if he were in a coma, and fill his environment with pleasant, familiar stimuli which might lure him to the surface of whatever quagmire of misery and terror he was currently floundering in.

Her first idea - that they should surround him with the sight and smell of potion ingredients - proved to be a very bad one, and it was only after Madam Pomfrey and Professor Dumbledore had spent a terrifying twenty minutes getting him comparatively calm again that it occurred to anyone that less than two weeks ago he had spent a day and a half lying in a Potions store-cupboard with his belly cut open, unable even to scream. But quizzing the house-elves about his favourite foods, bringing him his own blanket up from the dungeons, burning scented oils and playing music to him all seemed to help. He was still fragile and drifting, lost without anchor and unable clearly to recognize anyone or anything, but he knew the difference between pleasure and pain, and being fed on sweet tea and pistachio ice-cream did seem to reduce the frequency of his clawing, desperate panic-attacks.

Hermione even took to brushing his hair with a soft brush after washing it. The first time she tried it he was miserably submissive and quivery, expecting some fresh torment, but she hummed to him softly and kept brushing, and before long she had him almost as drowsily placid and unstrung as Crookshanks always was when she brushed him.

The house-elves, in fact, were even more than ordinarily solicitous towards Snape, and Hermione was intrigued enough to ask Rinna about it. The infirmary's head house-elf flicked her ears back and forth doubtfully. "Miss hat-knitting Miss wouldn't understand, Miss wouldn't."

"Try me. Was he... nice to you? Polite?" Hermione asked, trying unsuccessfully to square that idea with her memories of Snape.

"No, he is horrible to us. He shouts at us and calls us dunderheads and interfering little idiots, and he is deliberately provoking, and sometimes he throws things, although he is always careful to miss. But he is rude to us exactly as he is rude to humans, no more or less, and he provokes us as if we are persons to be provoked and not just livestock to be used, and he knows the value of work done with the hands."

Gradually, they settled into a routine. If Snape still seemed to know none of them, trapped half asleep in a confused tangle of fearful anticipation and fractured memory, still they had learned what really scared him and what didn't and except when he was actually dreaming they were able, generally, to keep his fear at a level of queasy tension rather than outright terror. Hermione even hoped, as she sat peacefully brushing his hair for him and listening idly to the matron's voice drifting through the door to the main hospital wing as she treated a patient, that he was beginning to recognize her - if not as someone he had known before, then at least as someone unthreatening in the here and now.

The private room he was in had been spelled silent, so that when he screamed shrilly and spasmed in his sleep his cries would not alarm any patients in the main body of the infirmary. The Headmaster persisted in believing that they would have the old prickly, over-sensitive, painfully dignified Severus back some day, if he lived - and he knew that Snape would find it humiliating to have the whole school listening in on his boiling nightmares. Besides which, the very fact that Professor Snape was still alive was being kept secret - from Voldemort, particularly, but also from the school. The Headmaster thought - and for once Hermione could see the point of his reticence - that to tell the Slytherins that their Head of House was still alive after four months of mind-wrenching suffering, to rouse all their romantic and protective instincts and make them feel that good had triumphed and that their protector had been saved from the clutches of the monster, and then to have to tell them that he was dead after all, or driven mad beyond hope of retrieval, would not only be cruel but would teach them a very negative lesson - that evil, in the end, would always triumph over good.

Noises from the outer infirmary, however, could be heard perfectly clearly in here, since it was thought that the sound of the day-to-day running of the school might help Professor Snape to realize where he was. Listening and brushing, Hermione heard the outer door bang open and a voice she thought she recognized as a third-year Hufflepuff Beater say something urgent about a broom and an accident - and then there were more urgent voices and the sound of hurrying feet - and then Snape jerked away from her hands and began to shriek, horribly, like something caught in a trap.

Oh, God - Professor McGonagall and Madam Pomfrey were just the other side of the door but they could hear nothing and there was no way she could leave him even to fetch them - and there seemed to be something almost equally dramatic going on out there anyway. "Professor Snape - sir - " she said firmly, trying to make him hear her as he wept and muttered "No - no - no," rolling up and trying to shield himself one-handed with his scarred face turned aside from her, deathly-white and gasping for breath. But she did not dare to touch him, and nothing she could say or do would reach him as he lay curled on his side, rocking and weeping in blind inconsolable terror.

An interminable ten minutes later the door opened to admit Adrian, come for his evening visit and talking over his shoulder about arteries to Madam Pomfrey, who was busy with someone in a bed on the far side of the room. Professor McGonagall at his shoulder saw what was happening before he did and hurried to Snape's side with a shocked gasp, wringing her hands and muttering "Oh, dear - Severus, I'm so sorry, we were busy with - " She glanced aside at Hermione distractedly, her square glasses sliding untidily down the sharp ridge of her nose. "Did you - do you know what provoked this, Miss Granger?"

"It was the blood," Adrian, the surgeon, said, flaring his flattened nostrils. "He smelled the blood."

It was only much later that anyone registered the fact that Snape had, for the first time, spoken while at least nominally conscious.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

He cringed and shook at the movement, as he did at any movement, now, and tucked himself down into a shuddering ball. They had moved him back to his own rooms, since he was stable enough now not to need round-the-clock medical supervision and it was thought that the familiar environment would be more pleasant for him - and a lot less prone to sudden shocks. But he seemed hardly any calmer here than he had been in the infirmary. McGonagall put her hand out towards him, wanting to touch him and not daring to, and murmured "Shush - shush now, Severus, you're at Hogwarts, you're safe now. Look at me, now - look at me." Trying to soothe him, as she had done so many times over the past two weeks, with a singular lack of success.

She had no expectation that this occasion would be any different - but this time, this time the command at least got through and he lifted his face, jerkily, like a puppet, and looked at her obediently. She almost cringed away herself: looking into his eyes was like looking down a tunnel into some awful abyss but she held his gaze by an effort of will and called his name again, coaxingly and this time, this time she saw recognition waking in those empty eyes like water flowing into a dry well. He stared at her, more focussed than they had yet seen him since his return, and opened his mouth as if to say something, but nothing came out except a gasping hiss. As she stared back, willing him to speak, he licked his lips and tried again. Finally, in a voice like the rustle of dry leaves, he mouthed "Minerva?"

"Yes - that's right, Severus - oh, yes, it's me, it's Minerva."

"Minerva!" he croaked again, hoarsely, and struggled to move towards her, though without his left arm to lean on he could barely raise himself from the bed. She gathered him up and folded her arms round him, and he clutched at her with his one hand, buried his face against her shoulder and whispered "Minerva - oh, Minerva" over and over, while she cradled him against her and the tears poured down her lined cheeks.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Are you real, Minerva?"

"Of course I'm real, child - what kind of a question is that?"

"The Dark One made me dream a false you, to torment me with, a false you and a false Dumbledore - I thought that I was safe, that I was home, and then he made me see how you spat at me and gave me back to the torturers but I didn't think you'd really do that - if you didn't want me you might give me to Azkaban but not to, to - please be real, Minerva. Please be you. Please be real please be real please be real..."

"As if I would do such a thing!" she said fiercely, hugging him against her. "As if either of us would give you up to _anybody_." Truth to tell, there were times in the past when she had wished his erratic temperament, his aggravating sense of humour and his smugly insincere post-Quidditch commiserations a thousand miles away, and if he'd had to end up in Azkaban to achieve it she would seriously have considered it, provided it was only for a few weeks. But right now she felt as if she never wanted to take her eyes off him, ever again.

Snape pressed himself against her, his eyes open and unseeing in the firelight and the gathering dark, and whispered "Please, Minerva, Minerva, help me - don't let go of me. Don't let me drown."

"Shh, child, shh. Of course I won't." Releasing one hand for a moment and hugging him the more firmly with the other, she took up her wand and transfigured the end of the bed into something resembling a giant armchair, so that she could settle back comfortably with him in her arms, and hold him for as long as he needed. "You can rest, child: we will not let anyone hairm you." Stroking his long hair back from his face, she began to sing to him softly, a fine old song about loyalty and lost hope and a promise of safety in a world of danger.

"...Come up by Glen Duich, and doon by Glen Shee  
An' roun' by Kinclaven and hither tae me,  
For Ranald and Donald are oot on the fen,  
Tae brak the wing o' my bonnie moorhen."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Albus Dumbledore rose to his feet and stood for a moment looking down the length of the Great Hall. Pumpkin lanterns grinned inanely and lasciviously from every niche and nook, but there were no grins on the faces of the students at this year's Hallowe'en Feast. The mood was grim and subdued even at the Gryffindor table, and the Slytherins looked as though all the heart had been taken out of them.

He cleared his throat. "Ladies, gentlemen, might I have your attention? Thank you. Many of you," he said steadily, "will have heard that Professor Snape's body was returned to us seventeen days ago, in a mutilated state." He heard one of the younger Slytherins give a muffled sob at that, but before the condition could become general he went on smoothly. "I have to tell you now that that was not entirely true, or at least not the whole truth."

Sharp eyes turned towards him - a sudden collective intake of breath. "Please forgive me, but I did not tell you this before because I did not wish to run the risk of raising false hopes, only to have to dash them. Professor Snape was and is grievously injured, but he was and is alive, and Madam Pomfrey assures me that his condition is improving and he is expected to survive." There was a sudden buzz of excited muttering at that, a flutter of movement, especially from the Slytherins - but not joy, no, because they had all, surely, heard of the terrible mutilations inflicted on Snape's body and the thought of him being alive and suffering was almost worse than him being dead.

Dumbledore leaned his hands on the table, feeling suddenly very tired. "I am sure that many of you, especially those of you in Slytherin House, will wish to visit the professor, but I have to warn you that currently he is too ill and too... exhausted to receive visitors. At present he is still - dazed after his ordeal but he is capable of recognizing his surroundings and of speaking," (after a fashion, he thought grimly, and if you included raving for mercy), "and we have considerable hope that his mental faculties will prove to be undamaged.

"Many of you... many of you will have seen the rumours in the press that Professor Snape was a Death Eater. I have to tell you now that those rumours are both true and entirely misleading." He had half expected an uproar at that little revelation - but you could, as the saying went, have heard a pin drop. The Slytherins didn't seem even to be breathing. "Severus Snape was... foolish, misguided in his youth, as so many young persons are, and he allowed himself to be misled by the false glamour of Voldemort's court and by his promise of a glorious new age.

"But Severus was not a particularly cruel man by nature - I know some of you might dispute that," he added, hearing a snort of disbelief from the direction of Gryffindor, "but his position was a precarious one, as has now been amply demonstrated, and the strain under which he lived had a regrettable effect on his disposition. He realized early on that Voldemort's promises were hollow and his cause evil, and he began to work secretly against Voldemort, whilst still appearing to work for him. He was not just my eyes and ears, as the press so kindly revealed last year; he was a mole and a double agent, working under deep cover: the most dangerous and stressful job of all.

"Severus Snape," he said firmly, "has probably done more, and certainly risked more, to counter the rise of the Dark Lord than any other single individual, not excepting myself. For that courage and dedication, he has paid a terrible price. Voldemort discovered - I do not know how - that during the battle at the Ministry of Magic it was Professor Snape who had betrayed him and alerted me. The professor was captured during the incident in June and - tortured very cruelly, over a period of months. This is the cause of his present injuries.

"He was returned to us as an object lesson, with the intention that he would die before our eyes, but fortunately and with... some outside assistance Madam Pomfrey was able to save his life. Hereafter I promise to keep you informed of any changes in his condition, and to let you know as soon as he is well enough to receive visitors.

"I have to warn you, however, that Voldemort is likely to take Professor Snape's survival as a personal affront. I did not think that it was either feasible or fair, especially to Slytherin House, to keep the news to myself any longer; but now that the fact that Professor Snape is alive is general knowledge, I am placing the school on high security alert. Please be on the lookout for any suspicious activities or magical traces, especially in the vicinity of Professor Snape's quarters, and report any such activities immediately to the nearest staff member. In view of the current political situation, I have to say, with regret, that that may include suspicious activities on the part of fellow students of this school."

He sat down, rather abruptly, and listened to the rising roar of angry, excited voices.

* * *

**Author's note:**

_The Bonnie Moorhen_ is a lovely but rather sad little Jacobite song about James Stewart (the father of Bonny Prince Charlie, and the rightful James VIII of Scotland as far as they were concerned) fleeing the country. It's sad because it's full of hope that he will return again soon - and he never did.

"...although he thought it as probably shouldn't" is a slight paraphrase of a fairly common if now slightly old-fashioned British expression, used to soften the impression of arrogance which may be created by praising oneself. E.g., "I did a really good job there, though I sez it as shouldn't." Somebody more refined and/or formal, like McGonagall, would say "...although I say it who probably shouldn't."

That largely concludes the medical detail, which may come as a relief to the squeamish. Apologies to anyone who found it disturbing: as someone with a degree in Biology whose best mate is an ICU ward sister I find operations etc. interesting rather than upsetting, and I wanted to show Adrian's cheerfully medical mind-set. Once again,thanks are especially due to cecelle for vetting all the medical bits for glaring inaccuracies.

Also, the story was written as an antidote to the sort of pornography-of-violence fanfic in which Snape (or any other character) is subjected to chapter after endless chapter of gloatingly-described as-it-happens torture and then doesn't even receive any sympathy and support as an antidote - either dieing horribly, or being expected to recover, without any apparent ill-effect, in a couple of weeks. I wanted to show how miserable, destructive and unerotic that kind of severe abuse is, to look at how you would really go about treating that sort of damage and how long it would take to recover, psychologically and physically - and to show Snape getting the proper kindness and care he deserves.

This chapter has been slightly edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to reduce the degree to which Dumbledore thinks of Snape as having been his friend prior to his disappearance, and to show people tending to think of him more as "Dumbledore" than as "Albus".


	7. 05 Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**5: STONE WALLS DO NOT A PRISON MAKE**

"I'm not a visitor," the blond girl said calmly. "I've come to read to him. And it's not as if I have a social life or anything." Without waiting for permission she sat down composedly at Snape's bedside, her bracelets of bottle-caps chiming gently as she moved, and began to read.

_"The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, although she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless colour of sea foam, but rather the colour of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea..." _

Snape lay quietly on his own pillow in his own bed, and looked at her. Or through her, perhaps - it was hard to tell - but Poppy thought there was a flicker of life there, and at least he did not seem to be afraid of the girl. It was hard to imagine anyone being afraid of Luna... although it occurred to Poppy, watching her, that an appearance of harmless dottiness was probably a very useful thing for an investigative journalist to have.

Snape's rooms were surprizingly comfortable, in a slightly down-at-heel way. They had moved his bed out into the sitting-room, which was bigger, and had natural light. It lay close to the cliff-face, and two deep window-embrasures pierced the rock and looked out on the surface of the loch - from both sides. As the changeable Scottish weather came and went so the water-level rose and fell against the glass, occasionally rising so high that the little hinged panes at the top could not be opened, and fish and stranger things came and peered in at them in the green underwater light. In high summer the water would barely cover the sill, and the sun would dazzle and dance off the surface of the water.

Right now the water was halfway up the glass and the day was murky, but there was a fire flickering on the hearth, very firmly cut off from the Floo network, and Adrian had brought a real lambswool fleece to lay underneath the bottom sheet of the ramshackle old four-poster, to prevent Snape from developing bed-sores on his fleshless joints. In truth they could have used magic to float him on a thin cushion of air, but the fleece was warmer and more comforting and it alleviated everyone's feelings, slightly, to make him as comfortable as he could be.

At least he was much calmer since he had recognized Minerva, and even though he was still very dazed and confused he no longer shook and cried at every movement. There was at least one person with him at all times, and provided they were reasonably quiet and steady so, for the most part, was he, at least when he was fully awake. When he was dreaming, though, or drifting, he still twisted and howled in the brutal grip of memory, or bolted awake and straight into a hammering panic-attack, and he was appallingly weak. It was a good thing, really, that Lovegood had appointed herself as what Adrian called a Talking Book, because the man was unable to read for himself, even had he been coherent enough to do so. Fragile and wasted, he was unable to support the weight of his own head on his neck for more than a few seconds.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The second person to turn up uninvited, hard on Luna's heels and within an hour of Dumbledore's announcement, was Neville Longbottom, complete with toad. He looked as apologetic and meek as only Neville knew how, but he refused to be discouraged, although his face twisted when he saw the extent of Snape's injuries and his papery fragility.

"I thought you were really frightened of him?" Luna said cheerfully, looking up from her book and placing something that looked suspiciously like a bacon-rind in it as a bookmark.

"I am," he agreed, nodding fervently. "Terrified. But that's not the point. I've got a lot of experience of dealing with people who've -' He looked down at Trevor's warty back and his face twisted again, as if he'd bitten on something foul. "People who've been driven out of their minds by torture," he concluded sadly.

"Oh, I don't think Professor Snape is exactly out of his mind," Luna replied sunnily. "Just a bit - dislodged."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The third person to turn up - and the fourth, and the fourteenth - was part of a substantial delegation of Slytherins who had had a furious overnight council of war and appointed themselves death-or-glory guards to Professor Snape in the morning - just in time to intercept Hermione Granger, who was bustling downstairs, in her innocently managing way, to brush the professor's hair for him before classes. The instant she started down the torchlit corridor that led to his quarters she was pulled up short to find herself confronted by a slit-eyed, scowling Pansy Parkinson, wand out and ready.

"And just where do you think you're going, Little Miss Bossy-Boots?"

Hermione stared round in some alarm, and found herself face to lowering, gorilla-like face with Gregory Goyle.

"Are you going to tell us what you're up to, Gryff, before we feed you to the squid?"

Hermione drew herself up to her full height, which didn't make much of an impact in comparison to Goyle's, but still. "Firstly, you and I both know perfectly well that the squid is under strict orders not to eat students," she said tartly. "And secondly, I would like to know what makes you think it's any of your business." If they were bothering him, or trying to keep people from helping him...

"The Headmaster made it our business," said Pansy, "when he told us to look out for 'suspicious activities in the vicinity of Professor Snape's quarters.' I'd say one of the Gryffindor trouble-makers turning up practically outside his door in a corridor where she's got no bloody business to be was highly suspicious, wouldn't you, Greg? What're you doing - come to gloat?"

Hermione bristled. "Coming to help, actually," she said with a bit of a sniff. Pansy always could get under her skin like nobody else. "I've been - " She caught herself on the edge of specifics and reined in her tongue just in time. He wouldn't want them knowing she'd been grooming him as she did her cat, surely he wouldn't. "- helping Madam Pomfrey," she finished, with barely a pause. "My parents are dentists... a sort of Muggle healer. And my sister's fiancé is a doctor. I'm no expert, of course, but I've picked up enough to be helpful."

She gave Pansy a rather nasty look. "And I don't start bawling my eyes out at the sight of blood, either, unlike some people." Maybe it was a bit unfair - they'd only been in third year - but Pansy's howling when Draco had gotten himself slashed by Buckbeak had been Decidedly Unhelpful.

"Oh, it's easy enough, isn't it, to watch someone bleed if you don't care about them - and don't try to kid on that you do. Ever since the Professor - ever since he disappeared, Potter and Weasley have been telling everyone that the _Prophet_ was right and that he was a - a Death Eater who went back to his _master_. You all probably just think he got what he deserved."

"Nobody deserves what happened to him," Hermione said with quiet intensity. "And I don't expect you to believe it, but I've been working as hard as I can to help him, and Madam Pomfrey will tell you the same." She flicked back her hair impatiently. "And I'm late, so if you don't mind, I'll get on and you can look for something genuinely suspicious... like, for example, the immediate family of known Death Eaters lurking around his rooms waiting for a chance to finish the job."

Goyle loomed closer, cracking his knuckles - suddenly looking like a real threat instead of a comic-book one. "I don't blame you for your family, _Mudblood_, so don't you dare suggest that I'd hurt Professor Snape just because some of my family... I'd kill for Professor Snape."

Hermione looked at him thoughtfully. "You know, I actually believe you," she said, a little surprized. "But that doesn't mean all your fellow Slytherins feel the same way... or anyone in any of the other houses who happens to have Death Eater relatives, and I know there are a few. There's bound to be some who aren't as loyal to him."

"I'm glad you admit it isn't only Slytherins who follow the Dark Lord," Pansy replied, equally surprized. "Like Sirius Black."

"Oh, Black wasn't a Death Eater," Goyle - who had access to inside information - said vaguely. "That was Pettigrew - another bloody Gryff. He stitched Black up. But Black tried to kill Professor Snape when they were at school. And Potty and the Weasel were _friends_ with him."

"_I_ wasn't," Hermione said sharply, but Pansy nodded grimly.

"You said yourself, there's people in other houses who have Death Eater relatives, who might want to finish the Professor off or hurt him again. We can't be too careful... if you've a right to be here, prove it."

"Oh, for heaven's sake... I can go through the wards, will that satisfy you?" Hermione said, rolling her eyes. She was getting worried... what if he realized she was late? They could never be sure what would upset him.

"All right then," Pansy said grimly. "You take us there, and Madam Pomfrey - or Professor Snape himself - can confirm your story. Or not."

"All right - but for heaven's sake, don't behave roughly or shout or anything around Professor Snape. Come on then; let's get this over."

Seizing her roughly by the upper arms, they frog-marched her down the corridor to Snape's door. 'Well, go on then, open the wards - since you say you've been here before."

Hermione, bristling, did so, and the door opened to reveal the great Albus Dumbledore fussily making a pot of tea while Professor Snape half sat, half lay limply against the shoulder of a tired-looking Neville Longbottom, who was saying in a low voice "That's all right, sir; there's no hurry." He appeared to be encouraging the man to hold a spoon and feed himself.

Pansy, startled out of any vestige of politeness, exclaimed "Merlin - another one!" and at the unexpectedly loud, sharp sound of her voice Snape gave a low cry and flinched away violently, jerking himself out of Neville's loose hold to sprawl on his side across the great bed, shaking like a frightened dog. In an instant Dumbledore was at his side, scooping him up to hold him firmly and murmuring reassurances. When the sick man had stopped gasping for breath, and his jolting shudders had eased to a thin trembling, the Headmaster finally looked up, hollow-eyed with strain.

"Miss Parkinson. Mr Goyle. Come in please and close the door. _Quietly_."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"It's all right, sir" Neville said steadily. "Look, see? It's Parkinson and Goyle. You know them." Snape looked, obediently - which was disturbing in itself. His eyes wandered across Pansy's face with a sort of vague, partial recognition, but when he saw Goyle he whimpered and pressed himself back against Dumbledore's chest, shuddering again, and Hermione hurried to his side defensively, knelt down on the floor and took his hand; a move which was not lost on Pansy. Nor was the fact that the Headmaster shifted to allow Hermione access, as if he expected her there.

"Your Dad's a Death Eater, isn't he Goyle?" Neville said thoughtfully. Goyle flushed dully.

"Yeah... sort of. What of it? I'm not."

"D'you look like your Dad?"

Goyle flushed even darker and looked down at his considerable feet. "Yeah," he muttered, as realization dawned. He looked up miserably. "But I'd never, never hurt the professor - "

"We know you wouldn't, Gregory" Dumbledore said gently. "I'm sure you want to do whatever is best for Professor Snape, and I'm sure he would know that too - if he was certain that you were you and not your father. But under the circumstances, perhaps it would be better if you waited outside."

Goyle nodded, once, hunched his shoulders and turned to go. As he left, Snape surprized them all by suddenly murmuring "...boy never stops growing. I worry about him, Dumbledore" and then looking at Pansy with intelligent focus and saying "Miss Parkinson," very clearly.

But when Pansy stepped forward to speak to him he looked at her blankly, his famine-sunken eyes wandering. "He does that," Neville said calmly. "He can't hold his focus for more than a few seconds, yet. It's nothing to worry about. At least he did recognize you, there."

"What makes you an expert, all of a sudden?" Pansy muttered sullenly. "What is this, some sort of Gryffindor take-over? Why weren't we asked to take care of our own?"

"This isn't a matter of inter-house rivalry, Miss Parkinson," the Headmaster said sternly. "Miss Granger has been of great assistance because, being Muggle-born and from a medical background, she has more knowledge of the treatment of long-term illness than most of we wizard-born folk. As for Longbottom - that is for him to tell you. Or not, as he pleases."

"I don't mind," Neville said sadly. "I don't see why I should be ashamed of it. My parents..." He looked at Pansy firmly. "My parents are - were - Aurors. When I was a baby Bellatrix Lestrange and, and some other Death Eaters tortured them both with _Crucio_ until they got permanent brain-damage, and went mad. My family just... Pure-bloods like us, we don't know how to deal with messy stuff like that, do we, so we just... sweep it under the carpet. They've been in St Mungo's for sixteen years, almost. I'm not going to let that happen to Professor Snape."

"Oh. I'm - sorry," Pansy said, discomfited. If someone had told her, in abstract, that Longbottom's parents were barmy she would probably have laughed, but hearing it from his own lips was different somehow. Seeing Professor Snape, who had always been the secure rock around which Slytherin House revolved, reduced to this shivering, emaciated shadow was horrifying and it was quite true, she couldn't think of anything to do with him except send him to St Mungo's and hope that someone there knew a quick way of putting him right, and she had enough sense to know that there wasn't one, and that he would simply end up on a long-term ward like - like the Longbottoms. And the two Gryffindors were being so _gentle_ with him. She would never have believed it if she hadn't seen it.

"Thanks. It's not just us, you know, anyway. We've got a Ravenclaw too. Luna apparently just turned up last night and announced that she was going to read to Professor Snape - and nobody knows why Luna does the things she does."

"If you or anyone in Slytherin feels they can help with the Professor's care you are welcome to present yourselves to Madam Pomfrey," Dumbledore said. "But it will be up to Professor Snape himself, how he... reacts, whether or not the offer of help is accepted. His well-being must come before our petty internal politics, and there are certain matters to consider which..." He stopped and went slightly pink. "Which perhaps, ah, Madam Pomfrey should explain."

"Oh, honestly," Hermione said briskly, standing up and giving Snape's shoulder an affectionate pat. "It's nothing to be that embarrassed about. What the Headmaster means is that Professor Snape becomes very... disturbed if he smells blood, so you girls mustn't go near him if you're menstruating."

"_You girls_? What are you, Granger, a boy in drag? That would explain a lot, but..."

It was Hermione's turn to go slightly pink. "I, ah, last summer, I had a contraceptive implant done. It's a Muggle thing. It stops me from..."

"From getting pregnant?"

"Well, yes. That too."

Pansy grinned a sly, delighted grin. "Little Miss I'm-So-Perfect - who would have thought it? Of course, we all knew you were snogging Krum when you were fifteen..."

"It's not about that!" Hermione said hotly.

"What, then?"

"It's just..." She moved to stand closer to Snape in unconscious empathy and he turned his head to look at her, puzzled but concerned. "I'm a Muggle-born," Hermione said quietly. "I know how - how vicious some of the attacks on Muggle-borns have been. If I was - attacked, I didn't want to run the risk of becoming pregnant on top of that. If - you know."

"Yes," Pansy said, watching the Granger girl's protective body-language towards Professor Snape as she talked about the threat of rape, and wishing she didn't understand it.

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

The fifteenth visitor was the Bloody Baron, who had once been starved and tortured to death in a dungeon just along the corridor from these very rooms. He drifted through the wall, trailing his bloodstained robes, to hover in the corner, gazing down at his companion in misfortune, his expression unreadable. But then, it generally was.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Much of the time, he still did not know where he was or who anyone around him was - and when he did recognize them, his conversation veered alarmingly between the coherent and the hallucinatory. Sometimes he had long, earnest conversations with people who weren't there at all. At times Minerva despaired, and thought that his calling her by her name had been no more than a lucky guess; but when she was feeling more positive she could see that Dumbledore was right, and that the periods when Severus appeared to know whom he was talking to (whether or not his conversation made much rational sense) were getting both longer and more frequent, and his episodes of delirium were becoming less severe.

Longbottom had gone down to Dervish and Banges in Hogsmeade and come back with an elaborate mobile hung about with shells and shards of coloured glass and delicate, silvery chimes - and more charms for protection and harmony than Minerva had ever seen in one place before. It dangled between Snape's bed and the window, catching the thin November sunlight and refracting it into a kaleidoscope of coloured rays which danced across his pillow and often, now, he just lay quietly and watched it, listening to its faint quicksilver notes.

And he always seemed somehow to be there enough to listen properly to Luna Lovegood, even if he rarely spoke to her or commented on the story she was telling him. He could only stay focused for about fifteen minutes at a time before his eyes started to drift shut again, but while he was awake he listened as if he knew what was being said. That surprized Poppy, at first - a bustlingly practical woman herself, she wouldn't have thought Severus would have the patience for what she dismissively thought of as a "fairy story" - but the more she overheard, the more she thought she understood the appeal of the book's delicate, slightly sinister balance between joy and tragedy.

_"No, no, listen, don't listen to me, listen. You can find your people if you are brave. They passed down all the roads long ago, and the Red Bull ran close behind them and covered their footprints."_

Adrian, who apparently knew it well, was delighted and assured Poppy that the book was a Muggle classic and a great favourite of his, "even though it's Fantasy, leik, and not proper SF." He still came every morning, bouncing in demanding to know "How's my favourite patient, then?" He was explained to the now-permanent Slytherin guard-detail on duty in the corridor outside simply as "a healer" - and let them assume he was from St Mungo's!

He was, he said, taking "a self-taught crash-course" in basic physiotherapy in order to help with Snape's rehabilitation, although the man was still a long way from the point where that would be a realistic option. He hardly had any muscles to exercise; starvation had stripped him almost to the bone, and any attempt to feed him up was complicated by the fact that he had lost about eighteen inches of intestine - as well as being still almost too weak to chew anything, although at least they had managed to repair his teeth, now. Poppy was working on a spell selectively to grow back the gut he had lost - a comparatively simple matter of lengthening what was already there, as opposed to replacing, for example, an entirely missing limb. But it wasn't something she would care to get wrong, and she still had her regular duties as school matron to attend to as well.

_"I am a king's daughter,"_

said Luna's bright voice, unexpectedly serious and resonant,

_"And if I cared to care,  
The moon that has no mistress  
Would flutter in my hair.  
No-one dares to cherish  
What I choose to crave.  
Never have I hungered,  
That I did not have."_

A cruel poem, it seemed to Poppy, to read to someone who had been so desperately hungry for so long, and she felt her eyes misting with tears.

_"I am a king's daughter,"_

the purring voice went on,

_"And I grow old within  
The prison of my person,  
The shackles of my skin.  
And I would run away  
And beg from door to door,  
Just to see your shadow  
Once, and never more."_

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

There was always somebody with him. Always. At first, Albus, Minerva and Poppy divided the time equally between them but it was difficult to do that and keep up with their other duties. Up to a point Minerva, in particular, was willing to let duty go hang and just spend all day every day with him but Severus himself, as he slowly came more into focus, started asking repeatedly, fretfully, "My students, who's teaching my students?" and they couldn't very well tell him that no-one was. For the sake of his peace of mind, as well as the students' education, she had to be able to tell him (truthfully - he would know if she lied to him) that she and Dumbledore were splitting Potions classes between them, as well as their regular work, until they could find a replacement for the errant and unstable Ms Sweeney.

_"Do not boast, old woman. Your death sits in that cage and hears you." "Yes," Mommy Fortuna said calmly. "But at least I know where it is. You were out on the road hunting for your own death."_

Reluctantly at first, but with increasing confidence, they began to let Granger, Lovegood and Longbottom take a turn at sitting with Severus unsupervized - trusting them to summon help _via_ one of the house-elves if anything went wrong. He seemed to be all right with them - which was to say, no worse than he was with Dumbledore _et al_. Longbottom and Granger both seemed to be very good at managing his moods, and Luna just kept him placid by reading to him all the time.

_"Where hearts are sour as boiled beer--  
Haggard is the ruler here."_

Sometimes, for a change of pace, she read him abstruse research papers from the latest Potions journals, or bizarre snippets from _The Quibbler_ - but it was Beagle's _The Last Unicorn_ which held his attention the best.

_"How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am _this_?"_

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Was that - was that Parkinson and Goyle, in here the other day?" said Snape's hoarse, ruined voice. "I thought I dreamed that they were here." Dumbledore smiled at him, pleased that he was actually remembering something from more than a few hours ago, and commenting on it fairly sensibly.

"Yes, dear boy. Seven - no, eight days ago. They came to make sure we were taking proper care of you."

"Oh. That was - kind of them, but I'm - disappointed that - " He stopped, colouring slightly.

"What are you disappointed about, dear boy?"

"No I - I've no right to expect..." he said dully. "Stupid." He turned his head and shifted awkwardly, as far as he was able to, simultaneously listless and restless.

"If there's one thing you have never been, it's that. A little foolish at times, perhaps, but never stupid. Tell me."

"I thought - thought that Draco might have wanted to see..." He flushed miserably, ashamed of his own presumption in thinking that his godson might care about him.

"Severus..." Dumbledore said gently. "I'm sure he would have come, but Draco isn't at Hogwarts any more. His father withdrew him; we think possibly because he didn't want the boy to see you when you were - brought back."

"Oh - oh God, Lucius will want him to take the Mark! You have to help him, Dumbled'dore!" His tongue stumbled over the multiple consonants in his weariness and his weakness, and the older man clicked his own tongue in irritation.

"Call me Albus, child, if you prefer - it's easier to say. If I can help Draco, I will. For all his faults, I do not believe Lucius would deliberately endanger him. Shh, now, don't distress yourself. The best thing you can do for any of your Slytherins right now is to rest and grow stronger. Will you eat a little?"

"Very well, D-Dumbledore. Albus. If you _insist_."

"I do - on both counts."

"Feels strange..." the young man murmured drowsily. "Y'r Headmaster..."

"But I hope that I am also your friend - or, if I have not always been so in the past, then I do intend to be in the future."

"Pity?" the other man jibed, his mouth twisting. "I suppose pity is all I'm bloody worth."

"Say rather that coming so close to losing you has made me realize the value of what I would have lost and the, the courage you showed in a rôle which I at least partially forced on you. None of which alters the fact that you need to eat."

"Very well - Albus. If you insist." But when he had tasted it he turned his face away and said sourly "What is this slop?"

Dumbledore beamed at him delightedly; for a moment there he had sounded quite like his old sulky, ill-tempered self. "It's ah, puréed, low-salt - a bit like baby-food, I'm afraid."

"It tastes more like dog food - you should give it to Lupin, and see if he barks. If you _must_ feed me slops and - and nourishing drinks that taste like bloody cardboard at least ask the house-elves to make me a proper hot posset. Finty knows how - and tell him not to scramble the egg this time."

"Oh, I shall - as soon as..." As soon as I've checked with Poppy or Adrian that it's safe for you to have, he thought, but didn't say it. "I'm pleased to see you taking an interest in your food."

But Snape looked away from him, his eyes starting to drift as he lost focus. "I shouldn't," he muttered. "I should eat up and be grateful for what I'm given. I am grateful - oh, God, Albus, just to have a bed again, and be clean... I don't want to be a burden."

"You're not a burden," his new-found friend and sometime employer replied firmly, "and you may have anything you want that's within our power to give." And thought, Please don't ask me to kill somebody for you, although if it was one of this frail, ruined young man's torturers he'd be sorely tempted to do it.

"Then may I have - have some tapestries, not anything with eyes, and no - no snakes. Please no snakes." His eyes had lit on the carved serpents over the fireplace. "The stone - the stone walls - I know it's - stupid of me, weak, but when I'm - often, often I can't tell where I am and the walls look like - look like a cell. Like - _there_. Oh, God." He started to shake again, tears welling in his eyes although he tried to suppress them, angry at his own weakness. "Damn, what a useless - can't stop - _crying_ - "

"Hush." Dumbledore gathered him up and held him close, smoothing his hair back from his face. "Hush, now. You shall have all the tapestries you want, but these walls are the walls of Hogwarts, not of a prison cell," (although they had been that once, his memory reminded him uneasily - there were good reasons why this part of the castle's underbelly was known as "the dungeons"), "and even if they were a prison why, I would be there with you, and blast all your enemies to smithereens for you. Smithereen - isn't that a good word?"

For the first time since his return, almost a month ago now, Snape actually laughed at that - even if it was only a wheezy little chuckle. "You would, wouldn't you Albus; you could blow their damn' - balls off for me." Still trembling slightly he shut his eyes and leaned against the older man, burying his face in the silver beard. "If you're holding me, they can't touch me. I wish..." he said drowsily.

"What do you wish?"

"Wish you never had to let go of me. Stupid - stupid I know, but if somebody - holds me, it makes it easier to... to remember where I am. Not - _there_."

"That isn't stupid of you. Not stupid at all. If you think it would help you to focus, somebody shall hold you all the time, for as long as you want. Do you want that?"

His friend nodded dumbly against his chest, and then muttered "Damn, oh - damn! Why do I have to be so fucking weak?"

"Because you are exhausted and ill, dear boy, and starved to a shadow. You can't expect not to be weak. Let yourself be weak, for a while, and rest."

* * *

**Author's note:**

The book which Luna is reading to Snape, and from which the quotes in italics are taken, is _The Last Unicorn_ by Peter S. Beagle. I couldn't find my copy when I originally wrote this chapter, and so Luna is quoting the poem about the king's daughter somewhat out of order with respect to its position in the book, as it should come somewhat after "How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am _this_?" But we can assume she digressed into poetry because Snape was losing the thread of the story-line.

To make a British hot posset, take a mug full of medium-hot milk and stir into it a whole raw egg and a teaspoonful or two of golden syrup (or honey if preferred), sprinkle nutmeg on the top and drink immediately, before it cools down. The milk must on no account be very hot when you add the egg - otherwise you end up with a mugful of sweet, runny scrambled egg.

Although we are re-editing this story to make it compatible with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, we have invested too much in our version of the Bloody Baron to change him now. For present purposes I am assuming, therefore, that the Grey Lady is a fantasist who is lying when she says that the Baron was her rejected suitor who killed both her and himself. It's a fudge, OK - but no worse than some of JKR's own fudges.

An even more major canon problem is that our version of Albus Dumbledore is very much kinder and warmer than the one we see in _Deathly Hallows_. However, given that he spent his teens regarding his sister as a burden and then a century racked with guilt over her death, it seems possible that he would be capable of guilt and grief over Severus's injuries when he was actually hit over the head with the reality of his suffering - and guilt and grief might grow into real affection. So I think our version of Albus in this story could be canon compatible, even though he's stretching it a bit.

This chapter has been slightly re-edited to reduce the degree to which Dumbledore thinks of Snape as having been his friend prior to his disappearance, and to show him moving towards real friendship now, and encouraging Severus to call him "Albus" rather than "Dumbledore".


	8. 06 Holding On

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**6: HOLDING ON**

They covered the walls with hangings and tapestries in bright colours, until the room looked more like a fairground than a prison cell, and Dumbledore had a word with the stone serpents round the fireplace, who slithered rather sullenly up the chimney for the duration. That was the simple part of Snape's double request. The other was more complex.

To begin with, he passed the night fairly quietly in Albus's arms. He still came half awake, with a shudder and a moan of distress, four or five times between midnight and breakfast - but that counted as a quiet sleep, by present standards. But when Poppy came to take over in the morning, and Albus explained to her quietly thatSeverus would do better if he was held, their patient flushed with embarrassment, turned his face aside and muttered "Dumbledore - Albus - please: don't shame me with the rubbish I talk when I'm - not concentrating."

"You were concentrating like a cat at a mouse-hole, dear boy. Will you tell me now, honestly, that you don't think that being held would help you?"

Snape bared his irregular yellow teeth (knocked even more crooked than nature had made them by years of rough living) in a sudden snarl. "Ask honesty of a spy! A traitor..."

"I ask honesty of a friend."

"And when were you ever honest with me?"

"On alternate Tuesdays - during Lent. That isn't the point. What matters here is what will be good for you; what will help you to - cope with your injuries. Tell, please."

"Then yes - is that what you want to hear? Yes, I'm so fucking weak I need to be held like a bloody baby." He flushed even darker, screwing his eyes shut to hold back tears, but Poppy sat down next to him quietly and drew him against her.

"Severus, you must understand - you are allowed to be ill. He Who Must Not Be Named has gone to extraordinary lengths to disrupt your sense of self, your sense of who and where you are, and if it takes extraordinary measures to help you to - stabilize your awareness of your surroundings, that's not shaming, or even surprizing. Will you let us help you?"

"Please..." he said roughly, in his torn voice.

"Please yes, or please no?"

"Yes..." he said with a sigh, and she set a lifting charm on him (though in truth he was still so thin she hardly needed to) and carried him through to be bathed - and then tried not to weep as she washed him. He had always had such beautiful feet, for a man of his age - slender and shapely, like his hands.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

It seemed to be quite true: if somebody sat with him and held him, round the clock, his periods of lucidity were longer and his deliriums generally less traumatic. Although "sat with" was a loose description: if he actually tried to sit up, properly, it made him so dizzy and faint that he almost passed out, so it was more a matter of somebody half-reclining with him, and the head of the bed was now permanently in giant-armchair mode.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The next complication was the little matter of who was to spend the night with him. Adrian still came at least three mornings a week to check on Snape, and today he had come in the evening as well, bearing food, so they left the man in his capable care and the six "regulars" held what Poppy Pomfrey called a "case conference" in her office in the hospital wing. The Headmaster outlined the situation rapidly.

"So you will appreciate," he finished, "that this raises certain - questions. I leave it entirely up to you whether you wish to continue to keep Professor Snape company under these altered conditions. We must also consider that it might be better if - well, if Madam Pomfrey or Professor McGonagall or I always stays with Professor Snape over night. There might be questions raised by the Board of Governors if, ah, a Professor was known to be actually _sleeping_ with a student, even if only, ah, in the sense of sharing a bed!"

"Why?" Luna Lovegood (who had turned seventeen the previous week) said calmly. "We're all of age. And Professor Snape isn't exactly our teacher any more, is he? And it's not as if he's going to do anything, or anything."

"That letter -" Hermione muttered. "According to Harry, that letter from - from He Who Must Not Be Named claimed that Professor Snape was - well, that he was in a relationship with Sirius Black, but Harry doesn't believe it and I don't really think I do."

"Oh, Professor Snape's not gay," Luna said, with such certainty that nobody questioned it, "but he's very well-behaved." She beamed at them all with her slightly poppy eyes. "When he has nightmares, I get into bed with him and give him a cuddle anyway. This is just making it official."

"I do too," Neville admitted with a slightly sheepish smile, "and Hermione brushes his hair - what's the difference?"

"What the Board of Governors doesn't know won't hurt it," Hermione said firmly. "It's like Luna said. This is Professor Snape - he's not going to turn into a - a mad rapist or anything, even if he was fitter. He might hit somebody, when he's having a nightmare, and I'm sure he'll be very rude to us when he's better, but this is... work experience, isn't it, in case any of us wants to be a mediwitch?"

Neville nodded agreement. "The Board of Governors lets us get splinched or or blown up or trampled by hippogriffs or dropped off brooms or, or menaced by basilisks - it's not going to shut the school down if I get a black eye while I was... seeing if I wanted to be a healer."

Afterwards Hermione, whose turn it was to sit with Professor Snape, walked back down through the castle and the tunnels that threaded the cliff-face. As she nodded politely to the Slytherin guards and stepped through the wards into Snape's quarters she could see him lying back against Adrian's shoulder, a fork still loosely clasped in his hand. He was making some progress, now, in being able to feed himself, though his muscles were still too weak to do so for more than a few minutes without tiring. Adrian's cheerful voice was just saying "...called a Carry-Oot, only this is more of a curry-oot, leik."

Snape's cracked voice replied quietly, "I remember - before. You brought me wine. Why?"

"Because you needed something to remind you that you were still human."

"Did it make a difference?"

"To your survival prospects? Not much, probably. To your state of mind? You tell me."

"Yes," Snape said quietly - and then, in an odd voice as if he were quoting something, "It is only goodness which gives extras."

Hermione came further into the room, feeling slightly like an intruder, and sat down at the edge of the bed, half on and half under the covers. "Miss Granger," Snape said rather stiffly. Straight-backed and rigid with embarrassment, he permitted himself to be handed into her arms.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The final problem was that he snored. Like many men with large but narrow noses he suffered from sleep apnoea, which meant that left to his own devices he snored in a rising crescendo, followed by a long, ominous silence and then a noise like somebody unblocking a drain. Sitting up in a chair beside his bed all night was one thing; lying beside him and attempting to sleep was quite another (except when it was Albus, who snored three times worse, and was more likely to keep _him_ awake). Fortunately Madam Pomfrey managed to come up with a commercially-available potion which helped with the worst of it.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

_"I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full"_ said the Lovegood girl's bright voice, and Poppy Pomfrey smiled at the thought. She felt her own heart painfully full, sometimes, when she looked at Severus and saw that he was alive, and something at least approximating to sane.

He was losing focus, now - drifting asleep, still unable to remain conscious for more than an hour or so at a time. Luna put the book carefully face-down on the bedside table and settled back comfortably with him curled against her side, and Poppy smiled again and went to get the bottle of _eau de toilette_ from the bathroom. Although Severus objected sullenly to a process which he seemed to regard as "girly," he admitted that dabbing a little of it on his skin made him feel less hot and sticky - always an issue with anyone on long-term bed-rest.

As she came back into the room the peaceful scene fractured into nightmare, as Snape gave a miserable wail and arched his spine, throwing his head back and baring his teeth in a sudden convulsion of distress, and then tore his arm out of Luna's embrace and started clawing at his own skin with his re-grown nails. Poppy hurried anxiously to his bedside but before she had time to do or say anything Luna said sharply "Professor!" in a hard voice which cut like a blade, "come back to me - now!"

He wailed again, tearing at his own neck and chest with such violence that, weak as he was, he somehow managed to rip the ageing nightshirt but Luna's firm, carrying voice said "Come on - out of it!" and at that he opened his eyes with a gasping sob. The two women, the young and the older one, held him between them until his breathing steadied but he was still shaking hard, his eyes flickering from side to side, trapped halfway between dreaming and waking.

As his eyes came back into focus he swallowed as if he was trying not to be sick. "Never - never believed," he said jerkily, "never believed the priest, talked, talked about Hellfire, never believed God the Father was as vindictive as V-Voldemort but when I was, when I was - thought I was in Hell, that it was going to go on for all of fucking eternity..."

"Language, Severus!" Poppy said automatically, without thinking about it, and he glared at her wildly, but Luna smiled brightly and said "According to my father's research, Hell is an abode of fire-demons, located eight hundred and seventy-three yards below Mount Etna."

"That's not - not actually as mad as some of the stuff your father comes out with, Lovegood" Snape said shakily. "Compared to the one about the three-legged Rockensnicker, it's nearly sensible."

"Thank you," she replied gravely, and drew him back down against her, and her voice talked down all the days, threading through the pattern of his slow martyrdom, telling him about a great bull without eyes, and a girl with a flower on her forehead, and a dry skull drinking the ghost of wine.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

At least they had an excuse, now, to get him some new and less abominable nightshirts, without making him feel that they were impugning the old ones.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"It worries me," Minerva McGonagall said tiredly, rubbing her eyes. "I mean, in some ways it's good, that he will allow himself to be comforted in this way, that he _can_ be comforted; but if you had known Severus before - such a very private man, and so unbending, abrasive even, and now to see him - crying, clinging, it's - devastating, really. A measure of how they - damaged him."

"I wouldn't worry about it too much - it's normal for people who're very ill or traumatized to be a bit sooky, leik, at first. Bob - my flatmate - he's doing Vet Science and he tells me it's the same with cats and dogs; when they're very ill they're all clingy and obliging and you can do anything with them, but as soon as they start feeling a bit better then it's all flailing teeth and claws again, and having to go three rounds to get them to take a pill. I'm sure when he's feeling a little better he'll be nice and disagreeable again, leik."

"You are certain - certain that he will get better?"

"I don't see why not. He's come this far... He was as close to death as anyone I've ever seen that didn't have a head injury, and that lived, and he fought his way back from the brink, didn't he? I don't see why he should stop now." He scratched his nose thoughtfully. "You know, for a while there I was afraid I'd have to insist on having him admitted to an ICU, and that would have been a nightmare."

"Trying to explain all the - the curses to a Muggle hospital, yes."

"Not just that. The police would have wanted to know who tortured him - and what could we have said? Lie or tell the truth, it's Contempt of Court either way."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The next thing (but it was a very big thing), now that Snape knew where he was most of the time (or knew where he appeared to be, at any rate, for he still sometimes thought his freedom was only a dream) was to get him a wand. His own was long gone - used to torment him until Lucius got bored with that particular game, and then broken in front of him. The whereabouts of Ollivander was still unknown and in any case Snape was still far too frail to travel, and too ashamed of what he perceived as his weakness and his crippled state to allow any magical sales reps to visit him. But Dervish and Banges in Hogsmeade was happy to send over a selection of suitable wands for him to try "in the privacy of his own home."

If he was embarrassed at needing to be held to get through the nightmares, he was ten times more ashamed of collapsing trembling in the strong hoop of Albus's arms, the one whole and the one withered, overcome not even by fear but by a complex mix of emotions in which relief and grief were equally mixed. Fifteen inches, hawthorn, the core made from the wing-feather of a hippogriff - a springtime wood whose symbolic meaning combined cleansing with male sexuality, and the beast that stood for freedom and hard pride. Power, and a degree of independence, and a chance to defend himself from attack.

Just being able to call water into an empty glass, or _Accio_ a book from the shelf, or light the fire in the hearth with a simple flick left him shaking and overcome, not sure whether to laugh or cry. And Albus Dumbledore sat and held him, and understood, and did not say, that the abuse he had suffered had left him feeling emasculated, symbolically if not literally, and having a wand again was almost like being made whole.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

His Slytherins came to visit him, cautiously by ones and twos, but there was little that they could say. He was too weak, yet, for long conversations, and if they came hoping to be reassured by seeing him alive and getting better, they left saddened by seeing him so damaged and reduced. And although he was pleased to see them, and touched by their concern, he hated them seeing him - mortally ashamed as he was both of his scars and of his need to be held - so the whole experience was depressing and unsatisfying on both sides.

"It's not that I mind you lot helping him - much," said Millicent Bulstrode, scowling impressively after one such abortive visit, "but I wish there was something more _we_ could do."

"Oh, but it's good for him to have people looking after him who aren't Slytherins," Luna said cheerfully. "It means he can shout at us without feeling guilty."

"I suppose," the older girl answered with a slow grin. "That does sound like him."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"You can see how - how bloody weak I am. Snivelling! - what you must bloody think of me, and even now I've got the bloody wand I can hardly use it. I can barely even lift it - and my magic..."

"You're not weak, sir - I don't know how you can say that you are. You beat them - all of them. Just having survived - that's a triumph."

"Don't be a damn' fool, Longbottom. I only survived because I was too fucking weak to fight them. Don't you understand, they _forced_ me to live when I was so - fucking - desperate to die oh God, please, I need to die - "

"Hush now - not now, you don't. It's going to be all right now."

"Not - not all right you - _idiot_ - can't get them out of my head oh God - "

"Would you be better if you asked the Headmaster to Obliviate you?"

"No! Stupid, stupid, no more - violations, amputations - "

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to be stupid."

"Not - your fault - mine, stupid, fucking, _feeble_ - "

"Shhh now, shhh, you are strong; you could have died when Ron's brother and Professor Flitwick broke the curses but you didn't die, you lived and got sane again... sane-_ish_, anyway. Hush. Take a deep breath now - that's it, and another one..."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

_"'I am no king, and I am no lord,  
And I am no soldier at arms,' said he.  
'I'm none but a harper, and a very poor harper,  
That am come hither to wed with thee.'_

_"'If you were a lord, you should be my lord,  
And the same if you were a thief,' said she;  
'And if you are a harper you shall be my harper,  
__ For it makes no matter to me, to me,__  
For it makes no matter to me.'_

_"'But what if it prove that I am no harper?  
That I lied for your love most monstrously?'  
'Why, then I'll teach you to play and sing,  
For I dearly love a good harp,' said she."_

"Is that really the end of it?"

"Yes. But there are other books."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

As the days ticked by he slowly relaxed into the idea of being held by this select little fellowship. He even stopped feeling awkward about letting the Gryffindor know-all see him insuch aneedy, dependent state, and started to quite enjoy having her hold him as she brushed his hair, although the knowledge made him miserably ashamed.

"I suppose," he said with a sigh, gazing at her with the dead weight of a lifetime's-worth of exhaustion in his eyes, "I have no right to resent - pity, even from students. I should be grateful that anyone would bother. Am grateful."

"Is that what you think it is?" she said, frowning at him. "Pity?"

"What else?"

"Concern," she said, still frowning, her hand drawing the brush through his hair in long, steady strokes. "And gratitude. Admiration. You may not ever have been - very pleasant to your students but you were a - a soldier, fighting for us all, and now that you've been - wounded in the course of duty, taking proper care of you and helping you to get better is the least we can do."

"Ever the sentimentalist, Granger - and rather too bloody optimistic. 'Better' is a relative term, isn't it?"

"Better than you've been, at least," she said, smoothing his hair back from his scarred face with a sort of painful tenderness.

"Don't patronize me!"

"I'm not. I wouldn't - ever."

"That'd be a first, then! You patronize every other bloody male in your life."

"Well, yes," she said, withthe ghost of a grin, "but patronizing Harry and Ron - that's different."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Harry Potter came, crawlingly apologetic for ever having doubted his loyalty, and Snape stared at him silently with a faint sneer on his lips, enjoying his discomfiture and deliberately not making it any easier for him.

"I'm - glad you're getting a bit better. Sir." Harry said awkwardly, looking at the rug. It was a proper old rag-rug; slightly scruffy, like most of the things Snape owned, and he wondered who had made it. He couldn't imagine Snape sewing, somehow.

"Sit around discussing me in the common room when you've nothing better to do, do you?"

"Everybody - everybody is concerned about you."

"How... _nice_ of them. I hear I have you to thank, Potter, for - thinking of using Muggle techniques to save my life."

"Well, yes, but - anybody with a Muggle background would have done the same. I'm sure if Hermione..."

"But it would have to be you, wouldn't it, Potter?" He turned his face aside. "If it hadn't been for you, I could have been decently dead."

"You see?" said Luna happily to Millicent. "It's good for him to have somebody to be nasty to."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

His eyes were still tightly shut but he cried out harshly and struck out at her, hitting her on the shoulder. She ducked and caught at his wrist to protect herself and he screamed, horribly, shockingly, and tried to throw himself sideways off the bed to get away from her. She let go of his arm and seized him by the shoulders. "Severus! Wake up, damnit!" That evidently penetrated his panic to some extent because he stopped struggling and went limp - and then began to cry, the tears leaking silently from behind closed lids.

Minerva McGonagall watched helplessly, feeling grey and drawn. But grey was the key, wasn't it? She drew a deep breath, sighed and dwindled.

Wearing her other self, she padded on little, pin-clawed feet up her colleague's chest and nuzzled him under the chin. He put his hand up blindly and rubbed her behind the angle of her jaw. "Hello puss" he said vaguely. Then his eyes opened and he recognized her. "Oh. Damn." He looked away, his face flushed with shame, but he kept on stroking mechanically until the grey tabby who was sometimes also a woman curled up against him and purred like a tractor.

When the tickle of her whiskers told her that his breathing had steadied, Minerva stretched and then stretched again, lengthening back into human form in the circle of her friend's arm. He hugged her against him, as far as he was able, and she put her own arms round him in turn and held him tight, until he tucked his face down onto her bony shoulder and relaxed against her. "How bad was I this time?" he murmured, as soft as a sigh.

"Bad enough. There now, shhh..."

"I was dreaming" he said in that sleepwalking voice. "I was dreaming that I was still - there, _then_, and they came to take my other hand. I could feel it, I could feel Pettigrew with his little penknife carving each fiddly little finger-joint apart, one bone at a time, and I knew in a few minutes I was going to have no fingers left..."

"Was that how - " She stopped and took a deep breath, trying to control the tremor in her voice. "Was that how it was done? Piecemeal, like that?"

"Yes... Pettigrew's bright idea" he said slowly, still half asleep. "After - after they'd had me for a while - weeks, I suppose, though it was hard to have any idea of the passage of time - he got bored because I wasn't, wasn't aware enough any more. I was just crashing from one pain to another like a beast in the shambles, just - reacting, mindlessly. But he wanted me to, to grieve over what I'd already suffered and anticipate what was to come in more than that - animalistic way. No offence meant."

"None taken" she said shakily.

"So he decided to - whittle me down to nothing, one joint at a time. Starting with the top joint on the little finger of my left hand, you understand, and then working his way round. Every second day he took another piece of me - he chose the interval himself, it gave me time to be suitably horrified in advance without ever growing numb to it - and then forced me to watch as my own flesh and bone was fed to Nagini. Or to Greyback, which was just - repulsive."

"That was why - why you asked Dumbledore to cover the snakes?"

"Yes. I know they're - traditional, for Slytherin, but they just reminded me of - of - And of course, taking my flesh and bone only strengthened the spell-hold they had over me, so that I couldn't take any action against their will - not even to end my own life."

"Oh, my dear." She held him close, rubbing his back gently, and he gave a breathless, bitten-back little sob and started to shake.

"Pettigrew made sure I knew - it wouldn't stop there. He and Lucius told me - told me all the time - that after they'd taken my limbs it would be my ears, my eyelids, eyes - one at a time, you understand - and then my nose, teeth, tongue." By now he was shuddering until his teeth chattered. "M-my lips. Nipples" he added, colouring slightly. "Then I was to be gelded, and finally emasculated, and if I was still breathing what was left was to be flayed - in instalments. It was only because I - because I became so exhausted I no longer reacted strongly enough to satisfy them that I was spared that."

"Thank God - thank God that they did stop, that you still have your right hand and your sight and speech and..."

He gave a thick, horrible laugh and pulled away, sitting up straight so that he could look her in the face and sneering at her in his misery. "Don't be a damned fool, Minerva. It wasn't an act of kindness, that they left me a hand until late. Lucius - Lucius arranged it, he told them all that I had only ever been good for one thing and for that I only needed a mouth and an arse and one hand and they all laughed, they all laughed, they'd each bloody-well had me at least twenty times over already and they knew it was true." He turned his face away sharply. "I am _nothing_, Minerva - nothing but an empty vessel for them to - penetrate."

"You are not." She took him by the shoulders and shook him, trying to get him to face her, but he hung loosely between her hands like an unstrung puppet, his head flopping horribly to the side. "Blast you, Severus, look at me!"

He laughed again, wildly, screwing his eyes shut and twisting his head back over his own shoulder, his mouth curling in bitter self-mockery. "Nothing" he repeated harshly - "Nothing but Lucius's fucking damned _whore_."

"Severus Snape, I order you to look at me" she snapped, and for a wonder he did so, though his hair hung in straggles across his face and he looked deranged and panic-stricken. She shook him again. "_Look_ at me. Now, you listen to me young man. You," she said fiercely, "you are one of the most able and worthwhile people I have ever met. You are clever and brave and skilled and, and witty and don't you ever forget it. Do you hear me?"

"Yes miss" he said meekly, and then gave her a shaky smile before collapsing forwards into her arms. As she folded him close and began to croon over him he laughed against her shoulder, more naturally this time. "You haven't changed, Minerva. Apart from being a bit bonier, and a few extra wrinkles, you're still just the same as when I was eleven."

"Laughter-lines" she replied firmly. "Never tell a lady she has wrinkles: they're laughter-lines." He permitted himself to be persuaded to swallow a few mouthfuls of water, and then she drew him back down against the pillows and held him in her arms and rocked him and murmured to him until they both fell asleep.

* * *

**Author's note:**

Don't worry, he _is_ going to feel better about things, eventually - but it's a slow process.

Once again, quotes in italics are from _The Last Unicorn_ by Peter S. Beagle.

"Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers." Said by Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1892 story _The Naval Treaty_, from the collection _Memories of Sherlock Holmes_.

"Sooky" is a common Scots and northern Englishword which I would guess is derived from "sucky", as applied to a human baby or a lamb which is cuddling up trying to suckle. It means being clingy and dependent and pleading.

This chapter has been slightly edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to show Snape getting used to the idea of saying "Albus", rather than "Dumbledore" as was formerly his habit.


	9. 07 Sleeptalking

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

This takes us into the first of the major two-handed scenes between Hermione and Snape. **Please note** there will probably be a delay of some weeks before the next chapter, as it will be being written mainly by Dyce and she's away visiting her in-laws at present.

Also note that this chapter is un-beta'd, owing to Dyce and cecelle both being away visiting family and aloe's ISP having been struck by lightning (really), so there may be some minor corrections made later.

* * *

**7: SLEEPTALKING**

"I thought of asking Horace Slughorn."

"He's - adequate, I suppose, Albus, but I could name you a dozen candidates who are more so."

"Yes, but I want someone who will be happy to retire gracefully once you are well enough to resume your duties - assuming that you wish to."

"And assuming that I will ever again be capable of doing so - which at present doesn't look very bloody likely, does it?"

"It's early days yet, dear boy, and you must give yourself permission to rest before you can hope to recover. Stop fretting, lie back and let us wait on you..."

"You were going to say 'hand and foot,' weren't you, and then you thought better of it."

"And what if I was? The principle is sound, even if the... details are a bit off."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"How's my favourite patient then?"

"Asleep. Do you have to be so obnoxiously lively at such an ungodly hour of the bloody morning?"

"Absolutely. It's part of the job requirements for hospital doctors. And you're sounding a lot better - cantankerousness is a very positive indicator of health, I find."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Now that Snape had recovered enough muscle-tone, and enough blood-pressure, to be able to sit up properly without fainting and to hold a fork without dropping it, he preferred to feed himself wherever possible - to the point that he threatened to bite Poppy if she tried to spoon-feed him, on the grounds that if she was going to treat him like a bloody toddler he might as well act like one. His dislike extended to having other people cut up his meals for him, so he tended to live on things which could be managed one-handed - macaroni cheese was a favourite. So was spaghetti, since even though he made an appalling mess with it, people with two hands fared no better.

Adrian still came every two or three days, through a complex arrangement which involved 'phoning the Weasleys and getting them to Floo someone to come and collect him. He had started Snape on mild exercises now, designed to strengthen his arm and his spinal muscles. But as November wore on into December he now tended to turn up in the evening rather than the morning, often bringing interesting food to sit and share. Snape was spoilt for choice as far as things to eat went - the house-elves fluttered solicitously about, plying him with kedgerees and risottos and chicken drumsticks, and seemed to want to feed him until he was spherical - but it was curiously enjoyable to do something as raffish and unregimented as eating Muggle fast-food out of greasy paper; and to have someone to eat it with.

Poppy Pomfrey stood one night in the doorway to Snape's rooms and watched them - the two dark heads bowed together as the young surgeon attempted to teach the older man how to use chopsticks, the bed littered with tin-foil trays and the Potions master's long, white, poet's hand enfolded and guided by Adrian's black, blunt fingers. Square, practical hands the boy had, a carpenter's hands she thought - but she supposed that Muggle surgery and carpentry had a lot in common.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Seven weeks after his traumatic return to Hogwarts, now, and he was beginning to be able to talk sensibly to visitors for more than a few minutes at a time. His colleagues from the Hogwarts staff came, anxiously, torn between concern for his suffering and fear of his temper. Even some members of the Order of the Phoenix came - including Remus Lupin, tentative and tongue-tied. The interview was an unsatisfactory one, since neither knew what to say to the other, but at least they managed to be reasonably civil.

"I, uh - " Lupin looked down at his hands, the fingers twisting together nervously of their own accord. "Harry said that - well, that - He Who Must Not Be Named claimed that you and Sirius... but that can't be right, can it? Apart from the fact that you hated each other's guts, when would you have found the time?"

"I should have known you came here for Black's precious sake, not for mine" replied Snape dourly.

"No I - I wanted to see how you were. I was really... we all were. Even Mad-Eye. But I was just - curious."

The other smiled a twisted smile. "No, Lupin, you can rest assured I wasn't lusting after Black's scrawny, flea-ridden body."

"Why, then...?"

"When I was - when He Who - " He started to shiver, slopping the tea out of the cup he was holding, and Albus - whose turn it was to sit with him - took it from him deftly and then folded him close.

"You don't have to talk about it if you'd rather not, dear boy."

"No I - it was... B-Bellatrix found out, I'm not sure how, that it was I who tipped the Order off about the fight at the Ministry. Maybe it was from something she got out of Kreacher. I knew if He - if He found out that I'd been spying on Him almost from the outset, all the disinformation you and I fed Him over the years would be wasted - He would know it was false. So I - I tried to convince Him that I had been His loyal servant up to that point, but that Black and I were lovers and when I heard Potter say that Black was being t-tortured..."

He shuddered, turning his face towards the older man's chest, his snowy beard: though it still seemed strange to him, to meet kindness where he had expected scorn, from a man who had been so harsh and unyielding over his transgressions in the past - the great albus Dumbledore, whose avuncular twinkle had hidden an iron heart. As a youth he had cringed before the old man's wrath and stammered for forgiveness; as a man, fire-hardened, he had met it with equal harshness of his own. "He took everything else from me: after they had - hurt me enough I couldn't hold my barriers any more, not my body and not my mind, but He - He can't comprehend love, He doesn't have the wiring for it, so He'll believe any foolishness of those who do. He - He wanted it to be true, so that He could sneer at the thing He can't have, can't feel so I - I think I did manage to deceive Him, in that at least. And I knew that - that He would probably want to taunt you with the details of what He'd done to me and if it included _that_, Lupin here would know that it was false, that I had still lied to Him and that I hadn't - hadn't betrayed you completely."

"I don't see that you betrayed me at all - not that I'd be worrying about it if you did, the circumstances being what they are."

"I should - should have found some way to keep Him out, instead of which He - He stripped my mind of information about the Order." Acceptance and genuine-seeming concern from Dumbledore still left him floundering as if the floor had been yanked sideways out from under him, but cringing and pleading had, shamingly, become his default position. "Albus I - "

"Hush, now - if you still managed to mislead Tom at all, you were doing much better than one could reasonably expect. You deserve a medal - literally - and I mean to see that you get one."

"A medal!" And there went harshness, bang on cue, even if it was directed at himself. "Just because I managed to keep one corner of my mind clear while I was - mewling for mercy and spilling every secret I possessed."

"Hush, shshh. You can do no more than your best - and your best is very good."

"I wish it had been more."

"I wish I was twenty years old, and smoulderingly beautiful, and having an athletically sexual affair with a rich handsome bachelor twice my age - but we have to play the hand life deals us, dear boy."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

When the water-level was low Hagrid - who found it difficult to force his vast frame through the narrow tunnels which led to Snape's quarters - moored a boat by the window and sat talking companionably through the rippling, aged glass, while Fang sighed and drooled and pulled fierce, wrinkly faces at the giant squid.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I brought you fish and chips tonight - with proper mushy peas. Got to have mushy peas, leik!"

"You're being northerner-than-thou again, aren't you?" He reached out to take the greasy paper parcel, and found that his hand was shaking.

"What?"

"Oh God, Addy - to have food when I want it, to have clean water when I'm thirsty. You can't imagine."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"..._maggots_?"

"Aye, well - you have to see them as a treatment, leik; not a - an infestation."

"I'm glad I was too dazed to take much of it in. Really I am."

"It was pretty hairy - but it could've been a lot worse."

"How, precisely?"

"Well, with some burns patients, leik, the distribution of the burns means that the scarring on their chest hardens like a load of old leather and restricts their ribs, and you have to cut, leik, notches in it, like one of those all-of-a-piece expanding string bags, so the skin can stretch. I was terrified I was going to have to do that with you - but the really deep burns were spaced out enough that I didn't have to."

"Thank God for small mercies, then - I have enough scars already, without ending up covered in polka-dots."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"You mean to tell me, Potter admitted to being the only virgin in the room and I _missed_ it? Damn!"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"It was - " He pressed his face against her shoulder, still shivering slightly, although the intensity of the flashback was beginning to fade and he was no longer breathing in great gulps. "I remembered... they hung me up by my hands - while I still had both hands although it must have been after they began to, to disjoint me, I could feel the burning where my fingers - and they whipped me raw, hung up like that, and that was bad enough, but then somebody - Antonin I think - decided to up the stakes by breaking my wrists. Then I had to, to stand up on my toes all the time, for hours, days maybe, it felt like forever, trying to take the weight off my hands, until my legs cramped and wouldn't bear me, and all the time people were hitting me or hexing me or - you know. Forcing - " To his own horror and embarrassment he felt hot tears running down his face and dampening Hermione's nightdress, but she made no attempt to pull back, instead stroking his hair gently.

Hermione rocked just a little, smoothing his untidy hair. "I know," she murmured, trying to stay calm and soothing. As much as she wanted to cry at the thought of what he'd been through, it wouldn't help a bit. "It's... well, not exactly all right, now, but over. We won't let anyone else hurt you." She cuddled him against her, trying to be tactful about it... while it obviously reassured him, it might embarrass him that it was her doing it.

"You don't know." He bit back a choking sob. "Everyone says that but you don't know, you can't know - how do you even know it's over? They've taken me out from Hogwarts once already, how do you know they won't - come back for me?"

"Well, I don't know what it was like, obviously," Hermione agreed, untangling a nascent knot in his hair with absent fingers. "But I do know what happened, in a general sense, because of the condition you came back in. That's what I meant - that you didn't actually have to spell things out, because when you said 'you know' I did, in fact, know." Semantics felt like such a relatively safe subject. "And they won't get you again, believe me. The ghosts and portraits are on constant watch, there's always someone with you, there are so many protective wards up around both the castle and this room that a flea couldn't get in - literally, Madam Pomfrey warded against anything that might bite and cause an infection, even a tiny one - and I have a suspicion that your blanket has been charmed to attack anyone who tries to hurt you. Professor Flitwick was very upset about you." She considered. "And in case all that doesn't work, all the secret passages have been blocked up, there is a general order out to students and staff for them to stun any intruder from hiding if at all possible, and Professor Dumbledore has had a word with the staircases."

"And we must just hope that it wasn't nitwit, oddment, blubber or tweak... It would be just like Filius to give a whole new meaning to the term 'security blanket,' wouldn't it?" He shut his eyes, pressing his face against her by now rather damp shoulder. "If you know what they did to me," he said in a low voice, "then you do understand that I mean that they - that they forced me. That way. That they made me... made me prostitute myself to them."

She nodded, hugging him very gently. "I know that they - that they raped you, yes," she said, her voice wobbling only the tiniest bit. "But it wasn't your fault, and you mustn't think for a minute that it was. It's... I don't know if wizards ever discuss it, I've never heard it mentioned, but Muggles do, and there are experts on the subject of post-rape trauma and things, and they say that most victims will often wind up blaming themselves. Feeling as if it's your fault - that you should have done something different, or fought harder, or something - is normal. And I'm sure they told you that it was, that you deserved it... but you didn't, and you don't need to blame yourself for something that happened to you." She paused. "Not that that's exactly how you put it, but it sounded like that was what you meant... as if they'd changed you, somehow, made you less than you were."

"Always by the book, Granger?" he jibed. "If a nine-headed hydra broke through that wall and we both simultaneously erupted in flaming boils you'd have an index-reference for it, wouldn't you? But they certainly did - change me, that is. Whether I am less - I certainly feel to myself as if I am, as if this... mutilation of limbs is only the outer sign of a more intimate or symbolic loss. They broke me, they smashed me in, I had no defence, they stole my - integrity, in the literal sense, my intactness. They broke the castle, they broke the castle and took me. During the day, sometimes, I - I can remember where I end and everything else begins but at night, at night" he said fretfully, staring blank-eyed at the candle-shadows on the wall, "I can still feel them driving into me, opening me up, I don't want to be opened up but they break down all the barriers and I am nothing, a dirty, broken, violated thing without boundaries and I can't tell where the world ends and I begin any more, the castle is me I am the castle if they could break the castle they could break me, they did break me, if they broke me they can break the castle, they could take me and break me all over again...

"And I know, damnit, that I could use that; if I could only find the centre and remember who I was I could really _use_ that, that sense of being everywhere and nowhere - use it magically, yus kin - but they won't let me, they won't let me have a centre, every time I try to rebuild myself they force their way into me again and scatter me apart." He hunched his back under her hands, shuddering, and laughed bitterly. "God, I'm so bloody feeble. I should be comforting you, not you me, but having somebody hold me - at first I was almost shitting myself with terror if anyone touched me but once I recognized... Having a friend touch me, having a friend touch me, it dilutes, overwrites the memory of them touching me, at least for a moment, and being held - being held is an anchor I can hang on to. If I can't find my own centre, I can centre myself on you and not feel so - so totally bloody lost."

She held him closer, rocking a little, making little soothing noises until his breathing slowed down and the sudden near-delirious ranting eased to a halt. "You are not feeble, and you should not be comforting me. I'm not the one who needs it. I can't... I wish I could fix it, somehow make it better. I hate that I can't, and I'd do it in a moment if I could. But..." She rested a hand gently on his chest, right over his sternum. "Take a deep breath. Focus on my hand... touching you, but not hurting you, a friend's hand giving you something to focus on... and another deep breath..." It was a wobbly one, but it counted, and she cradled him protectively with her other arm. "I'm here," she said softly. "And none of us would ever, _ever_ let them have you again. I promise, we won't ever leave you alone and vulnerable, not for one moment, you'll be as safe as we can possibly make you..."

He put his hand up to cover hers and leaned his weight against her, such as it was. His eyes were closed in a face as white and translucent as wax, but slow tears still leaked out from under his thick lashes, and repeated small tremors chased across his skin. Almost inaudibly, he whispered "I'm lost, I'm lost, I can't find me - please don't let them find me. Please, please, don't let them have me - not again. Please, not again."

"Shhh..." she whispered back, rocking him gently. "Nobody will hurt you again. We won't let them. _I_ won't let them. You're safe now, and nobody's going to hurt you any more." She pressed very lightly against his chest, reminding him to breathe again. "And you're not lost," she added firmly, because she was damn well not going to LET him be. "You're... just gone a bit astray, is all. It will get better, I promise it will, it's just going to take some time..."

"A stray dog," he muttered, "got lost on the road, Padfoot is after me... Why won't the bastard leave me alone? I can't tell when I'm dreaming any more and when I'm not - are you a dream, Granger?"

"No, I'm not a dream. And Padfoot isn't after you, either, not any more." She shifted his slight weight a little, letting his head settle more comfortably against her shoulder. "After all, if you were going to dream up someone to comfort you, I shouldn't think they'd have bony shoulders, would they?"

"A very good point," he admitted sleepily. "A very sharp point. And - the Dark One might invent - invent simulacra of Albus and Minerva to torment me with false hope, but I can't see him thinking of copying you or, or Lovegood. I notice you didn't mention the Floo network in your security list" he added, in a much more alert and Snape-ish tone of voice. "Should I expect darling Lucius to erupt out of the bloody fireplace?"

"The Floo network has been disconnected and blocked. Even the one in Professor Dumbledore's office is locked down now. There's no way for anyone to suddenly appear or disappear anywhere in the grounds, excepting unauthorized Portkeys... and those would set the wards off at once." She thought the pedantic attention to detail was a good sign... and explaining the exact steps taken would surely be more reassuring than vague reassurances of safety. "And Hagrid has taken steps to prevent anyone flying in by broom - the Thestrals, I think, although I've been rather afraid to ask. He's also patrolling the grounds at night with Fang and Buckbeak, in case someone tries to sneak in. He was very upset about you, too, and I think anyone he DOES catch sneaking in will be very, VERY sorry about it. Probably immediately."

"I like the idea of using Thestrals against Death Eaters - that's quite... poetic. But I'm not sure disconnecting the entire Floo network is a good idea: suppose there was an urgent message? Tell Albus - tell Albus to open one fireplace again, in a warded room, and have an armed team watching it round the clock - then reopen the others and divert them into that one room... That way, if anybody does come for me he can catch the bastards. We might as well get some use out of the situation." He shivered. "I think they - I _think_ they must have brought me in by boat at about four a.m. the day before you found me - I must have been lying there for about thirty-six hours, thanks to that little fool Sweeney not checking the stores when she was asked to. Tell Albus - tell Albus he needs to watch the water, I think they brought me in over the loch. But it's so hard to - I ought to remember, I _need_ to remember, it could be important for security to know just how they got in but I was in so much fucking pain I can't make it come clear in my mind, even with a Pensieve."

He started to shake in earnest again. "Oh, Christ, it hurt so much. And I'm so fucking weak - physically weak, I mean, so don't lecture me - I'm exhausted all the bloody time and yet I can't get tired enough to sleep. That - the book Lovegood read me, Amalthea, the unicorn-girl, she said 'Even when I wake, I cannot tell what is real, and what I am dreaming... I remember what cannot have happened, and forget something that is happening to me now.'" He gasped and shook his head as if coming up from deep water. "Same - same thing, I'm lost and drifting not properly sleeping, not properly waking, and then I dream that I'm awake, I dream when I'm awake I think and it hurt so much, it all hurt so fucking much and when I dream it I can't tell that it isn't still real, if it still hurts so much what does it matter if I'm still there or if I'm only dreaming it, they're still hurting me either way... What can you give me to prove that - that this is the real reality and the other one is done with?"

She hugged him close again, rubbing his back slowly. "Shh... The mermen are already on the alert but I'll tell him about the lake - and the Floo. And I still don't think you'd ever dream about me, but if you need to be convinced..." She thought a moment, then grinned suddenly. "We've just started on Probability in Arithmancy. It's terribly interesting... Professor Vector says you can even use it for foretelling the future, in a very limited, statistical way. Much less woolly than Divination, just a matter of working out what's most likely to happen. We have to do three feet on it for Monday, and I'm going to leave it until the weekend because we're covering Anomalic Statistics on Friday and I'm sure I should include that... not that I don't know what they are, of course, I've read the textbook quite thoroughly, but Professor Vector often mentions things that aren't in the book and if I try to do my homework ahead of time then I'll just have to go back and rewrite it later. I've made some notes, of course... a foot or two... but it's really so vexing to have to rewrite a whole three or four feet just to insert a few salient points in the third paragraph. It's really much more convenient the Muggle way, with pages, instead of having everything on the same sheet. Spells of amendment really don't work for squeezing in more than a few dozen words."

"Footnotes are acceptable, you know, provided you number them carefully and are neat about it. And I often used to dream about you, Granger, before... When I was feeling particularly insecure, I used to dream that you were asking me questions I couldn't answer, in front of the whole class, which I seemed unaccountably to be conducting in my underwear. If you... if you like, go over to that bookcase in the corner there, by the cloak-stand, and bring me that big, light-green book there with the black lettering at the top of the spine. That's got three chapters on Anomalic Statistics and I happen to know it's the book Vector cribs most of her ideas from, so I can talk you through Friday's lecture in advance.

"I'm not convinced about Arithmancy, though. Calculating frequency-nodes for forthcoming events is one thing, but deriving magical associations from the numerical values of the letters of the alphabet seems so - arbitrary. Surely in another alphabet - in Hindi, say, or Iroquois - the same letters, the same names, would have quite different numerical values? And I don't see that using the ancient Chaldean alphabet makes it any less arbitrary."

Hermione settled him very carefully on his pillows before going to get the book - _Principles of Arithmancy_ by Solaris Tusian - and hurried back to the bed, sitting down beside him and opening the book eagerly. A New Book... and Arithmancy, her very favourite subject. "I love Arithmancy... I mean, it's a bit disorienting the way the numbers don't always come out the same, but it's fascinating. I agree with you about the letters of the alphabet, though... I'd think it would work best if you used numerical and alphabetical systems that belong together... that are from the same time and language, I mean. Applying Roman numerals to, say, Sanskrit just seems a bit random."

Snape nodded tightly and leaned against her, shutting his eyes and trying to get his breath back without letting on that even being left without the anchor of her touch for one minute had shaken him badly; the embarrassing truth was that being held all the time had left him rather phobic about not being. He had no one to blame but himself - he should have told her to _Accio_ the damned book, instead of fetching it in person. Or done so himself: but his arm and his magic were both still so weak he was afraid to attempt to move such a heavy volume. "That... stretches credulity a little less far, I agree. But Divination... divination does work, in fact, but the problem with it is that it is extremely subjective. To an undisciplined mind - and dear Sybill has one of the least disciplined minds I have ever encountered, even when she hasn't been hitting the cooking sherry - it can be almost impossible to separate true vision from mere imagination." He reached out and tugged the Tusian book into a more convenient position. "Now - you will have to cast the wand-light, Granger. I have only one hand, and I need that to turn the pages."

She tucked her arm under his thin shoulders, helping to support him in a comfortable sitting position, and murmured "_Lumos_" as she lifted her wand and tucked it into her hair so she wouldn't have to hold onto it. "There. And I had dreams about you too, you know. Mostly nightmares... I'd get to class, and look at the blackboard, and I couldn't read it. I'd forgotten how to read, and you would tell me to start my potion and I just wouldn't know what to do. And then everyone laughed." She shuddered, leaning against him. "They weren't all nightmares, though. There was one time when you turned up in my dream making a potion that smelled like strawberries that you kept insisting would fend off werewolves. It worked quite well, except we had to fill water-balloons with it to throw at them because we had to get it _on_ them and we didn't want them to get close enough to pour it on." She paused and blushed. "Sorry. I do ramble a bit sometimes."

"Rambling through fields of strawberries, Granger... I'll have to try it on Lupin and see what happens." He settled back comfortably with his head on her shoulder and her warm breath tickling his ear, and thumbed the book open at the right page. "Now. Tusian says that for events with a probability density of less than point two per cent occurring over the current lunar month..."

Hermione found herself enjoying the impromptu lecture immensely. The subject was fascinating, he understood it well, and besides that, it was good to hear him sounding... not happy, exactly, but interested and at ease. The lines of pain in his face relaxed slightly, his head resting easily on her shoulder, and she snuggled down a bit beside him so the pillows supported them both.

And then she looked down at him and her heart thumped suddenly. Nothing turned over, there were no fireworks, no imaginary blows to the chest, no burning of any description. Just a thump to indicate that she had, against all sense, taste, and reason, managed to fall suddenly and hard for someone who couldn't possibly ever return it.

She missed the next few sentences entirely as she struggled valiantly to keep her sudden horror from showing. It was just a crush, that was all. (No it bloody well isn't, a part of her insisted, we've had crushes, this isn't anything like the same.) She'd been looking after him, holding him, protecting him, it was perfectly natural that she should get... attached.

Even if she knew perfectly well he was never going to reciprocate.

That particular thought made her want to cry, and she bit her lip hard to counter the urge. Belatedly, she realized that he was starting to slow down, his voice getting fainter. "You're starting to sound sleepy again," she said, amazed at how level her voice was sounding. "Want to finish this in the morning?"

"Mmm" he agreed rather muzzily, "but make sure you do wake me in time to finish it for you. Since I'm keeping you awake half the night when you should be sleeping or studying, it's the least I can do." Awkwardly, for he was still very weak, he rolled over onto his side and curled up against her, with her arm round the back of his shoulders and his own arm draped across her waist. "I'm sorry you should have to waste so much time, Granger, holding on to such a, a piece of human wreckage just to keep him from drowning."

"It's not a _chore_" she replied earnestly. "It's a pleasure to - " and then turned bright pink and refused to say any more.

"I can see the advantages of having a captive audience who shares your interest in Arithmancy and arcane incantations," he murmured drowsily; "especially given the - limited intellectual range available to you in Gryffindor. But unless you have very advanced and peculiar tastes, it can hardly be a pleasure to have a, a grown man who ought to know better snivelling on you like a bloody two-year-old."

"Oh, it can," she said seriously, smoothing his hair back from his weary face. "It's so much better than doing nothing. With you alone, I've been unable to help more often than I want to think about, and there have been more than enough other times as well. This... it's _something_, that I can do, that will help. You know, I'm sure you know, how much better it is to be able to do something, no matter how small, instead of nothing." She tugged the blanket up over both of them, extinguishing her wand and setting it on the table beside the bed. "And it's a positive joy to hear you snivel... not that you do, it's more of a whimper usually... when we were so afraid we'd lose you altogether."

"Would that have been so terrible?" he said into the sudden near-darkness of the firelight. "To all intents and purposes, you _did_ lose me. You thought you were getting back a, a whole man, mentally if not physically; one who could still be of use, to the Order and to the school, even if he could no longer function as a spy. Instead - instead you got back someone who can be - nothing but a burden, someone whose mere presence compromizes the school's security and endangers everyone in it. If I were less selfish I would turn my wand on myself and rid Hogwarts of the burden and danger that I am; but fucking Lucius and his merry chums have taught me so fucking much about helplessness and the impossibility of action that I still can't gather enough mental resources to do it."

"You shouldn't, and please don't even think it!" she exclaimed, half sitting up. "We didn't want you back just because you were useful, we wanted you back because we didn't want to lose you. And maybe it was selfish, of us, to try to keep you alive when you'd been hurt so much, but we wanted to keep you with us, to help you if we could, no matter how long it takes or how much looking after you need!"

"But why?" he said painfully. "What purpose do I serve? What possible good am I - like _this_?"

"You don't have to be useful to be valued," she said softly, wishing that someone older and significantly wiser were here to have this conversation in her place. "You... are important, in and of yourself, to more people than I think you realize. You don't have to serve a purpose, you just have to be here, and safe." She lay back down, tucking her arm under his shoulders again. "I, for one, am glad that you're... well, not 'all right' as such, but alive and hopefully capable of being so again someday..."

"If I'm useless, how can I be valuable? It's not as if I'm very bloody ornamental, is it?"

"You're yourself, and valued by some of us at least for that," she said softly, shifting to settle his head on her shoulder again. "I wish I could explain it better... but I'm glad you're alive. Not because you're useful, or potentially useful, or even decorative, but because I don't want you to go." She blushed in the dimness, wondering if her new, sudden awareness of her feelings showed at all. "And I know Professor McGonagall and Professor Dumbledore feel the same... and Professor Flitwick cried when Adrian said you were going to live, and so did Hagrid, and... people care about you. They want you to be safe."

"Hagrid would cry if he found out that a Blast-Ended Skrewt was going to live." He frowned at the shadowy room. "I suppose... if Minerva were hurt, for example, I could see the point in wanting her still to exist, even if she could no longer work. But I don't - I don't see myself as part of the set of people who might be wanted for themselves. Nobody has ever wanted me for myself before, so why should they begin now? I am - not particularly pleasant to have around, after all."

"Maybe they're starting now because they didn't realize how important you were to them until they thought they'd lost you," Hermione suggested. "People do that, you know. We take other people for granted, and we don't always tell them that they're important to us. Or maybe they thought you knew." She yawned, snuggling down a bit. "And you can be pleasant to be around. That Arithmancy lecture just now was very nice."

"Good Lord," he said with an answering yawn, snuggling down too and leaning against her in sudden contentment. "If students are starting to find me pleasant company, I must be losing my touch."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

In the morning, Snape was sleeping so soundly and so apparently contentedly that Hermione didn't like to wake him any earlier than she had to, so she slid her arm out gently from under his bony shoulders and padded barefooted to the bathroom, leaving the door half-open so she could see if anyone came into Snape's rooms that shouldn't be there. She was just stepping out of the shower, dripping, when she heard a bang and a yell from the direction of the bed-sittingroom.

Grabbing a strategic towel with one hand and her wand with the other, she shot wildly through the door just in time to hear Snape say "It's all right Dobby, really, I'm not - angry. Just don't creep up on me without warning like that, all right?"

Hermione sagged back against the door-post, so overcome with relief that it took her a moment to realize that she was wearing nothing except the towel, clutched somewhere in the loose vicinity of her bosom, and that Snape was raising one long sardonic eyebrow at her and smirking. Colouring violently and cursing him under her breath, she backed hastily into the bathroom and threw her day clothes on.

Telling herself she was allowing Snape privacy to speak to Dobby, she drew several long, deep breaths, and did not venture out again until she heard the second sharp bang which told her the house-elf had left. As soon as he had done so she gritted her teeth and re-entered the bed-sittingroom, since she couldn't leave Severus on his own (when had he become "Severus" to her?). He smiled at her with a faintly mocking, knowing look, but made no reference to her earlier _deshabillé_ as he settled into her arms, comfortably and with relief.

"That was Lucius's old house-elf - poor little brute" he said with some animation. "Lucius treated him like - well, you can imagine. He fixated on me when I was a teenager because I was the only one in that circle who didn't actively ill-treat him, and I'm touched that he's still so concerned about me, but he damn' near gave me a heart-attack. For one ghastly moment I thought I was at Malfoy Manor - before I took in the clothes and the cheesy grin. Cheesy in more senses than one - God, his _breath_. And really, you never want to wake up eyeball to eyeball with something with eyeballs like that..."

Without warning, he gave a wild and rather cracked laugh and began to shake, pressing himself firmly back into Hermione's hold. "House-elves with bad breath! This m-must be real," he stammered, shuddering until his teeth rattled, "because if I im-m-magined being - being saved I wouldn't imagine _that_."

* * *

**Author's note:**

"Yus kin" is a north Derbyshire expression, from the sort of area Snape probably comes from. Literally, it means "You are kin to me:" metaphorically it means "You understand what I'm saying."

This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to comment on the fact that Albus had sometimes been very hard on Snape in the past, before he was injured. Also, in view of JK's post-DH revelation that Albus is gay, not bi, his dream-date has been changed from "a rich sultry widow" to "a rich handsome bachelor", and his description of his ideal twenty-year-old self from "handsome" to "smoulderingly beautiful", in order to avoid having the word "handsome" twice in one sentence.


	10. 08 What Hermione Did Next

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**8: WHAT HERMIONE DID NEXT**

Hermione was sure she'd never, ever been quite so embarrassed. Being sick on the teacher in front of her entire class when she was seven had hitherto been an unchallenged first in the embarrassment stakes, closely seconded by turning herself furry. But actually being _naked_ in front of a former teacher, who she had found herself caring for far more than she should less than eight hours before... towel or no towel, she was so embarrassed it took hours for her muscles to even begin to relax from the mortified curl they kept trying to push her body into.

And that raised eyebrow and smirk... if he'd been in good health, she'd have slapped him, or at least wanted to! As it was, she'd managed not to do more than blush until she was relieved, and could go to her own room to whimper into her pillow.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Since there were six of them to sit with Snape, they divided up the day so that each day one person stayed eight hours overnight, one person had the day free and the other four each stayed with him four hours, workload and study-periods permitting.

It would be almost a week, therefore, before he and Hermione would spend the night together again, and that gave them both time to recover a little from their embarrassment: hers at having been seen dripping wet and very nearly naked; his at having been so emotionally open with a student, although he knew intellectually that she had probably heard most of it already, and worse, when she had sat through his raving deliriums.

And it did help; when his spirit felt like one huge festering abscess he had to admit that it did help to get some of the poison out into the open and find that neither Minerva nor the Granger girl recoiled from him, even when he wanted to recoil from himself. Even so, it couldn't be pleasant for someone so young and unsullied to have to listen to the sordid details, however much she might claim she cared about his injuries.

He knew he probably ought to be embarrassed about having seen her clad only in a towel, as well; but she had slender legs like a young deer and her hips weren't bad either, and the memory made him smile in the way that the coloured glass and the silvery chimes made him smile. And even though he knew she was doing her best for him, and he was mortifyingly grateful to her for it, he still couldn't help taking a certain malicious pleasure in being a cause of discomfiture in one of the Golden Trio.

So he was gravely formal, and only smiled reminiscently to himself when he knew she was nearly not watching.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"He hasn't said anything," Hermione told Crookshanks, who was curled up on her pillow. He didn't like her going away one night a week, but having her bed all to himself did seem to console him a bit. "But he smirks when he thinks I'm not looking. And I can't decide whether I want to slap him, or be happy that he's actually looking almost pleased, or... well, wish for him to want to see it again. Which is really, really embarrassing."

Crookshanks sniffed at his paw and licked it once or twice, evidencing massive unconcern. "You needn't look like that," Hermione said, waving a clean sock at him. "It's not as if you haven't spent hours watching me in the bath yourself."

The cat flicked his tail, giving her a disdainful look... and then he seemed to relent, rolling onto his stomach and tucking his paws under his chest, giving her his full attention.

"Thank you." She sat down beside him and scratched behind his ears. "I really don't know what to do about this. Just hope it goes away, I suppose. But... he's so important to me, and I don't even know why. Not that anyone ever does know why they care for someone, I suppose." Crookshanks licked her fingers, and she smiled. "Well, except for you. You love me because I give you sardines. I don't think that would work on him."

Crookshanks purred, butting his head against her hand until she found the itchy spot under the other ear. "I don't think petting him will work either, but I'll try," she said, giving him one last pat and picking up the schoolbag that now contained her nightgown and clean clothes for tomorrow. "I love you, kitty."

The cat curled up on her pillow, ignoring her pointedly as soon as she showed signs of leaving him.

Much later that night, she stroked Severus Snape's hair gently as he started to stir and whimper, and thrilled shamefully to feel him relax as the incipient nightmare was averted, cuddling against her. "You just aren't playing fair," she whispered, holding him protectively. "And you don't even know."

He stirred and mumbled. "Wha's it?" he asked muzzily.

"Nothing," she murmured, rubbing his back gently. Mental note - don't speak aloud, even when he's asleep. "It's all right. You sleep."

"Mm." He burrowed his face into her neck, drifting into sleep again.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Please don't be embarrassed, Severus; I need to look at the - at where the limbs were severed."

"Does it make a difference?"

"Oh yes," Flitwick replied in his high voice, leaning his elbows on the bed and peering at the scarred crater where his colleague's left leg should be. "I have to be able to visualize the - the area of attachment, while I'm shaping the charm."

"You really think you'll be able to make something that will - that will enable me to walk, at least?" Sylvanus Kettleburn had been similarly injured, and had coped so well with his prostheses that he had continued to teach for thirty years after his right arm was ripped away by a manticore, which he had been belabouring with one of his rosewood legs at the time, wielding it like a club. But Sylvanus had been fitted for false limbs within hours of losing the originals, while those limbs were still a clear part of his body's morphic field: not months after the event, when all that was left was a dull, healed-over stump which had forgotten how to be anything else.

"Oh yes - in time. But it won't be simple. Alastor, for example, he still has his own leg to just below the knee so the wooden limb requires no - no articulation, beyond the charm which makes the claws shape themselves to the ground. But a whole leg or arm - one that's actually real and fixed, that won't evaporate when the spell wears off and that's integrated into your own nervous system, as Alastor's eye is - that's going to take time. And I imagine you'll want something a bit more... realistic."

"If I had lost both legs at the hip it might have been interesting to end up with - with eagle's claws, or some such. I could really _disturb_ all the little first-years, if I had talons." Sylvanus's habit of taking his false legs off in the middle of morning coffee-break and scratching the stumps luxuriously had also been pretty disturbing, if one thought about it - although he tried fervently not to. "But since I still have one leg to the knee I shall be content to be as, as human as I ever was; and I emphatically do not want to end up looking like a collection of spare parts flung together by a Victorian cabinet-maker."

"Like Alastor."

"Like, as you say, Alastor."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Now that Snape could sit up and use a wand, at least for light work, he was finally able to read for himself - and even to return a favour, sometimes, by reading darkly dramatic poetry aloud to the Lovegood girl. It helped his voice, which was cracked and roughened and always would be, but which still had both passion and pace when he worked at it; and her wide-eyed admiration was good for his shattered self-confidence.

Of course, Luna Lovegood had a head-start in the wide-eyed department.

He could even write, if he wanted to, using the same swivelling over-bed table on which he had his meals, and weighting the parchment down with stone paperweights to prevent it from rolling up on him as he wrote. Thus equipped, he was able to work off some of his irritable energy by launching a vitriolic attack on the views expressed by a distinguished expert in the latest edition of _Alchemical American_.

But it wasn't enough - not nearly enough. Christmas was coming, and beyond the safe confines of his rooms he could feel the buzz of excitement building, and he remembered far too vividly what sort of Christmas Lucius had had planned for him, if his body had not failed him faster than expected. By now if he had counted the days right he would have been eyeless, tongueless - waiting helplessly to be gelded. The idea that if things had gone as Lucius and Pettigrew had planned what was left of him would still (still!) have been writhing and squealing on the stone floor while they flicked their wands at him in idle amusement, tearing his already flayed nerves with inventive agonies, or took more direct and personal pleasures the mere thought of which made his flesh crawl and his throat convulse with nausea... that idea set his heart racing and the blood pounding in his temples every time he allowed himself to remember it, and when that happened, even obliterating some harmless old American fossil's pet thesis was not enough.

Frustrated by inactivity, but too afraid and too ashamed of his own maimed ugliness to contemplate leaving his rooms, he had Hermione Granger bring some of the potions she was making for the hospital wing down to his chambers, where she could work at the stone bench in the corner and he could assist her (and incidentally exercise his muscles, what was left of them) by chopping and mixing ingredients on the over-bed table, and nit-picking at every move she made.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"He's driving me mad," Hermione said ruefully, stacking neatly labelled jars into a cabinet in the infirmary. "He niggles at every single thing I do. It's wonderful, though... there are moments when he sounds almost like himself again."

"That does sound wonderful," Madam Pomfrey said happily. "He's still so clingy, a lot of the time, even the occasional flash of temper is glorious."

"I know. Even if it is annoying." Hermione rolled her eyes. "I think it's helping him to feel useful, even in a tiny way. He's talked more than once about feeling useless..."

"He has." Madam Pomfrey rummaged through another cupboard. "I'm running low on the mildest Sleeping Draught, for the younger students. For some reason, they've been having a lot of nightmares lately."

"I can't imagine why." Hermione shook her head, closing the door on the neatly stacked jars of Bruise Balm. "Of course, we'll do that next."

"Thank you." Madam Pomfrey sighed, leaning against the cupboard. "You have been telling him that it doesn't matter if he's... useful... haven't you?"

"Of course I have. I just don't think he believes me." Hermione sighed in her turn. "I'll keep trying, of course."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"No, no you silly girl, faster than that - and add the Hart's Tongue with every seventh stir." Caught up in his own frustration at not being able to do the whole thing literally single-handed, unnerved by the lack of direct physical contact and angry with himself for being unnerved, he brought the knife down sharply on the bracket fungus he was busy dicing and over-reached himself, jarring his fingertips against the chopping-board and bending back the newly-grown nails.

It was too much - too like one of the endless catalogue of horrors lodged in his head. With a hoarse cry he shoved the over-bed table away from him, sending it and everything on it crashing to the floor, and curled up on his side with his eyes squeezed shut and his fingers pressed to his mouth, licking frantically at the bruised nail-beds and trembling in panic.

Hermione was at his side in an instant. "Professor - sir - come on now, shhh..."

She laid her hand lightly on his forearm, sick with care but not wanting to startle him as he turned his face away from her, muttering "Not my hands - please, please not my hands."

"Shhh, shhh, it's all right, nobody is going to hurt you, you just - you just hit your hand against the table. Shhh."

They sat there like that, quietly, while the cauldron bubbled away on its own in the corner. After what felt like forever Snape's breathing steadied and he opened his eyes to see Hermione watching him with gentle, anxious concern. Perversely angry, his snatched his arm away from her and snapped "Idiot! - you've let the Breathe-Easy boil over. Now we'll have to start again."

"I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I didn't like to leave you while you were..."

"While I was _what_?"

"Well - distressed."

Snape dropped back against the pillows, shutting his eyes against her cloying, doe-eyed concern. "You think I don't have a right to be bloody distressed?" he snarled, dimly aware that he was being irrational but hating her pity - hating his own self-pity worst of all. "Look at me!" He clawed neurotically at the mottled brand across his temple, at the long scar which bisected his cheek. "I used to - I used to - when I was, was dis-_stressed_ I used to sit with my knees drawn up and, and - " and wrap his arms round them and rock like somebody mad, like a crazed child but he couldn't say that, not here, not now, "but I can't even fucking do that any more because without a lower leg I can't - " He turned his face towards where his left arm should be, panicking, drowning...

"Of course you have a right to be distressed." She gently pulled his hand away from his face, keeping him from digging his fingernails into the scar across his cheek. "I'd debate whether that's sufficient reason to be rude to me when you know quite well I can't call you names in return, though. If I could, I would be seriously tempted to call you an interfering bossy-boots who thinks I can't chop daisy roots without having my technique criticized." She assumed a reproving expression, watching him anxiously. Sometimes he responded better to tartness than to sympathy.

Snape came within a hairsbreadth of replying "I'll be rude if I feel like it," but a last thin vestige of commonsense told him that sounding like a brattish three-year-old would not improve his position here. Instead he drew a long, ragged breath, and then another. "You may - retaliate in kind if you wish," he said unsteadily. "You can't possibly call me anything worse than what I've already called myself: you haven't the vocabulary."

"I really don't," she admitted ruefully. "I'll have to start looking up swear-words in my spare time, I suppose. But I'll be honest with you when you're being irritating, if you like." She wanted to gather him up in her arms and hold him protectively, but she crushed the impulse, instead tugging a tangled lump of blanket out from under his shoulder in as business-like a way as she could manage.

"If you really think that 'bossy-boots' is an appropriate expression to be used by one adult to another then you really do need to broaden your linguistic horizons, Granger," Snape replied sourly. He still felt shaken and unsteady, but her sharpness had at least broken him out of his spiralling panic. "Perhaps I should give you lessons in profanity - at least then I'd be serving some bloody purpose.

"As for being irritating..." He let himself fall back against the pillows, his eyes shut. "I live to annoy, Granger - surely you know that. And I have some much - better words for myself. Cripple, coward, whore, ingrate, useless burden - "

Hermione laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. "Now I, personally, disagree with all those words except the first one," she said firmly. "Which, given the circumstances, is hard to argue with. But the others... you are none of those things, and someday we're going to manage to get that through your stubborn head." She straightened the twisted neck of his nightshirt. "Although irritating you certainly are. Madam Pomfrey says you do it because you think it's funny to make people twitch."

He felt like crying - he was crying, he couldn't help it, he could feel the hot tears leaking out from under his closed lids, but at the same time... He made a strangled noise, half cough and half sob, and his lips twisted. "Adrian says that I - that I '...like toys that don't need batteries - wind them up and watch them go.'"

She lay down beside him, tucking an arm gently across his ribs. "That sounds like you, yes," she said softly, fighting down an urge to kiss him. "And you're awfully good at it... it must be so frustrating to have all of us refusing to be wound up because we're so worried about upsetting you. I promise, you haven't lost your touch, I'm just getting better at biting my tongue."

Snape rolled over against her with a sort of choking laugh. "That's - reassuring, and you're quite right: I really, really need a fight, and everyone's being so bloody - careful and considerate around me, it makes me want to scream." He tucked his face down against her shoulder and held her tightly. "Oh God, Granger, I can't _do_ this."

"What can't you do?" She pressed her hand against his back with a steady and steadying pressure.

"I can't - can't even sit and dice toadstools for more than two bloody minutes without somebody holding me. Stupid, fucking weakling. Stupid fucked weakling."

"Actually, you lasted a good five minutes," she said, rubbing his back gently. "Which is an improvement on a few weeks ago." She felt horribly guilty about it, but she couldn't deny that it felt nice to have him nestled against her, his face nuzzled against her neck. "You're getting better, even if it is painfully slow. And I could let Ron in, if you want someone to shout at to take your mind off it. I've always found him a very effective verbal target."

"That's - not a bad idea" Snape said with a slightly cracked laugh. "He's almost bound to say or do _something_ annoying, isn't he? Tiresome boy. But oh, God - " He clutched her even tighter, like a drowning man holding on to a spar, until she had difficulty breathing. "I'm so fucking tired of myself. I feel like a - a dead weight that I have to pull everywhere can't stand, can't do magic worth a fucking damn, can't even get to the fucking lavatory unless someone else carries me, can't be on my own for - all right, for _five_ minutes without panicking, do you have any idea how - " He choked and turned his face to the pillow, away from her. "I've lived on my own all my life, and now I can't bear it. You tell me, Granger, what bloody purpose do I serve - like _this_?"

"You don't need to serve any purpose. You're not a... a kitchen implement," Hermione said, reaching up to smooth his hair lightly. He didn't flinch when she touched it anymore, not as long as he knew it was her and he wasn't having one of his fits of panic. "You're getting better, you really are. It just takes time..."

"Fine," he snarled, hunching his shoulders. "Time, that's what everyone says. How much time, Granger? Six months, a year, ten years, a century? At what point does the time invested in me become - ridiculous?"

"It doesn't, it never does. Really, you must believe - " She became aware that behind her Minerva McGonagall had come in silently, her tartan dressing-gown draped over her arm.

"Miss Granger," the older woman said quietly. "What is wrong?"

"The - " bloody idiot, she nearly said, but she managed to bite it back just in time, "Professor thinks that he is... not of any practical use, now."

"I'm quite capable of speaking for myself, thank you" he snapped.

"But not of thinking for yourself, apparently" McGonagall said smoothly, "if you're going to go off on daft ideas like that."

"Oh, come off it, Minerva" Snape said rather shakily. "Even if - even if I may some day be capable of resuming some of my teaching duties, you have to admit that - that preserving my miserable life represents a very large expenditure of resources for very little return."

"I admit no such thing," the Deputy Headmistress replied composedly. "Dinna be so foolish, man. You, yourself, are all the return we ever sought - just you, alive and as close to whole as we could get you."

And later, later when he sighed and shifted unhappily in his half-sleep she curled against him and purred, just for him, and when he drifted towards waking in the half-darkness of the firelight it was to find a warm, furry bundle lying stretched along his chest, and leathery little cat-pads pressing against his nose and lips.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Crookshanks nosed Hermione's ear cautiously, and she rolled onto her back, sniffling and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. "I'm fine," she told him, pulling him into a hug which he tolerated with more than usual patience. "I'm just frustrated. I want to help him, and I was utterly useless today. It was... awful. He was so miserable, and I couldn't DO anything."

Crookshanks tucked his head under her chin and purred. This was his standard response to her inexplicable bursts of shedding salty water and making peculiar sounds, and she smiled, scratching behind his ear gently. "Aw... Thank you, Crooks. I know you love me. I just wish... well, things I shouldn't wish." She kissed the top of his head and sat up. "But you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make a list. That always makes me feel better."

She rummaged in her trunk, locating the only contraband she ever smuggled into Hogwarts each year - a couple of plain exercise books and a little stack of pens. Writing in bed with quill and ink was a recipe for disaster, as she'd learned in her first year, so she'd decided to sacrifice her Magical Authenticity on this one point.

When she'd arranged herself comfortably - curtains pulled around bed to make a warm, dim cave, Crooks snuggled up under her raised knees, and her wand lit and stuck in her hair - she stared at the blank page in front of her.

After a moment, she wrote down "Ways to Eliminate Unsuitable Crushes" on the first line.

Then she underlined it.

After several minutes, and the rejection of "talking self out of it", "using anti-love potion" and "avoiding him", she sighed and crossed the heading out. Talking herself out of it plainly wasn't working, she couldn't avoid him, and if he caught her using a potion...!

She replaced it with "Ways to Help Professor Snape".

This was more productive. She managed to come up with "Give him more to do - make him feel useful", "Discuss Arithmancy + other intellectual subjects - keep mind off other things", "Provide new reading material if possible", and "Find someone for him to shout at - regular basis?" before running out of ideas.

After staring at the short list for a long time, she sighed and turned to a blank page. Making lists usually made her feel better. Writing things down tidily always helped her to sort out tangled emotions, she'd even made a list of pros and cons about the _in-potentia_ relationship with Ron, and whether or not she should continue trying. But this guilty yearning feeling was proving unusually recalcitrant. Lists could not tame it, apparently.

She sucked meditatively on the end of her pen, and then... why not? Nobody need ever know... and hadn't Jane Austen once said of love that "one good sonnet may starve it quite away"? Something like that.

"You wore your distance like a cloak-" No.

"Thy disdain cannot deter my -" Closer, but no.

She chewed on the end of her pen, digging a hanky out of her pocket in case she needed it again.

"Thou didst wear distance like a cloak, a shield..."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"You're very patient with me," Snape said quietly, as Hermione Granger prepared to hand him on to the Lovegood girl. "Both of you. And I do - I do appreciate that. If you... It was quite - pleasant, talking about Arithmantic theory the other night, and if you have any similar questions you shouldn't feel... inhibited from asking me about them."

"Oh, I won't!" Hermione said happily. "Feel inhibited, that is."

"It's not - when I get angry, it's not really you I'm angry with. It's myself."

"I know," she said seriously. "I do understand."

He bared his rather horsy teeth in a brief snarl, although he was more amused than angry. "You do, don't you Granger. Do you have any idea how annoying that is?"

"Oh yes," Luna said solemnly, perching herself decorously on the side of the bed.

"I suppose this is my penance for teasing you."

"Yes," said Luna, nodding.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Hermione, as usual, didn't go home for Christmas. She was too obvious a target, Harry Potter's Muggle-born friend... she hadn't dared go home since she was in third year. She tried to at least spend a few weeks with her parents each year, but she'd insisted that they take holidays together rather than staying at home. Kingsley had removed their home address from her records, and magic was never used within a mile of the Granger household. Most wizards had no idea how to locate a Muggle aside from actually going out and looking. She hoped staying away would be enough to keep them safe.

Luna Lovegood, on the other hand, would be returning home for Christmas. Fond though she was of Snape, she explained solemnly that her father was always rather sad over the festive season, missing her mother, and if she left him to his own devices he would be even sadder.

Ron was going home for Christmas too, for a wonder. Although nobody liked to say so out loud, there was an unspoken feeling that the war was hotting up and that this might be the last Christmas that all the family (except Percy) might be able to attend. Harry could have gone with him, but he too feared there might never be another complete Weasley get-together and he felt that his presence might be an intrusion. So he stayed, awkwardly, in the place which was the nearest thing he had to a home, with the people who were the nearest thing he had to a family. He wondered what that made Snape.

Neville, on the other hand, was outstandingly happy to have a good excuse not to have to spend Christmas with his grandmother, although he arranged to Floo from Hogsmeade to St Mungo's on Christmas Eve to visit his parents. He came back silent and subdued, his normally open face carefully blank, and stared at Snape as if he was afraid the man would evaporate if he took his eyes off him.

As for Snape himself, the awareness of what had been planned for him ate into his bones until he became increasingly depressed and anxious. "Christmas Eve," he muttered, rubbing the heel of his hand across his eyes, and running his tongue neurotically along the scars inside his cheeks, as he did whenever he was especially anxious, now. "Christmas Eve, and I should have been down to Midnight Mass in the village. I'm so - _tired_ of myself, of being so bloody tired all the time..."

"You know the priest will understand that you are ill. I could send an owl to him and ask him to come and see you later, if you like."

The younger man ducked his head, embarrassed, although trusting this new Albus not to curl his lip at him was starting to feel almost natural. "No I - not ready to be seen yet. Not - like this."

"Then light a candle. It's almost midnight now; light a candle, and I will too - to give thanks for your return to us."

"Such a narrow escape - such a narrow escape," he said fretfully, his eyes glassy with fear as the reflected glimmer of the candle-flame burned in them, fever-bright.

"Narrow or not, you did escape it, dear lad. Shush now, don't fret - you _did_ come back to us, you did keep your hand and your eyes and your - faculties, and no-one will take them from you. You're home and safe."

"I don't know, Albus - don't know... Sometimes I feel as if - as if there were two timelines, two ways it could have gone, and this one is only a dream or a - some sort of a fragile interim experiment, and I'm going to wake up on Christmas morning and find myself back in the other timeline, trapped in that - ruined shell. Trapped and burning."

"You will wake up nowhere but in my arms. Wherever you are, I will be with you."

"I'll hold you to that, old man." He pressed his face against the white beard and held on tight, and when he woke it was to the heavy scent of Neville's gift to him - three dozen winter-blooming hyacinths, flooding the room with their colour and perfume.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Hermione Granger had defied expectations and found him an old music box... no Muggle contraption that tinkled out a tinny version of a single tune, but a box of polished rosewood filled with small compartments, each of which produced a different, flawlessly performed piece of music when opened. ((The charms on the box had recently been either replaced or strengthened with some vigour. Flitwick had always said she had talent.))

Snape stared at it and ran his fingers fluidly over the surface, listening to the soft notes stepping down through the measure like a fall of water, and feeling embarrassingly breathless and overwhelmed. He had never in his life woken up to gifts, beyond the occasional pity-present from Albus, but this was something else, something that really felt meant. Even Albus' gift felt as if it was really meant - and it occurred to him that perhaps it always had been, and he had failed to notice.

And there were the hyacinths, a thing Longbottom had made with his own hands, their scent filling the room until he felt sleepy and drugged; and Minerva had called by first thing and presented him with a bottle of very elderly and dignified Cognac, which he had no intention of sharing with the younger generation. Lovegood had bought him his own illustrated, hardback copy of _The Last Unicorn_, with the pictures spelled to move like wizarding ones, so that he could see that "oldest, wildest grace" for himself. He had only dim memories of the flesh and blood unicorn that had saved his life - but this one, perhaps, had helped save his sanity.

Poppy, practical and kind, had made him a bed-jacket with simple fastenings which could be operated one-handed, and Adrian - who was very sensibly spending Christmas with his fiancée - had sent him an enormous box of chocolate liqueurs (easily enough to share), and another of maple brazils. This was not even to mention the tinful of Molly Weasley's excellent home-made mince pies. Feeling pleasantly sinful as he spoilt breakfast with sweet pies and alcoholic chocolates, he wondered guiltily if he should have returned the favour. But he had never anticipated this... outpouring of generosity.

"I did wonder," he said, frowning, "- wondered if I should still try to send a gift to Draco; this will be the first Christmas since he was born that I haven't. But I thought - well, receiving a present from the traitor might get him into too much trouble with his father. Or worse, if Lucius - if Lucius has already forced him to take the Mark."

"He will understand, surely," Poppy replied seriously, as she helped him to wash. "Coming from such a family, he'll surely understand the - political ramifications."

Filius Flitwick was left to preside over dinner in the Great Hall, for those other staff and students who were staying on - although he promised to be down later to see "dear Severus." The six - including Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall - minus Luna but plus a rather uncomfortable Harry all chose to have their Christmas dinner with Snape in his quarters, since he was still far from well enough to join the festivities in the Great Hall. They were all pleased - and Harry was secretly relieved - when Hagrid managed to thread his vast bulk down the winding dungeon corridors and join them. He perched himself on the end of Snape's bed, which creaked alarmingly, and helped himself to about a gallon of beer. Fang helped himself to half a turkey, and disappeared with it under the bed.

Sitting quietly in a sort of triangular space between Minerva, Poppy and Hagrid, Snape himself wasn't quite sure what he felt about the whole thing. It was the first time since his return to Hogwarts that he had been dressed in robes instead of in a night-shirt or a hospital gown; the first time that he had sat on the bed instead of in it. The dress-robes were his Christmas gift from Albus - loose, flowing black silk with a slight grey-brown tint to it like a raven's wing and a fine tracery of darker embroidery around the neck, of a far better cut and quality than he could ever have afforded for himself, and they covered the space where his legs should be so well that the absence was nearly not noticeable.

And he had always hated Christmas - had felt like the spectre at the feast, the eternal outsider, congenitally unable to unbend enough to join in the ridiculous jollifications, despite Albus's best efforts. Like the Bloody Baron, perhaps, a real spectre at the feast, dour, taciturn and empty-eyed where he hovered half in and half out of the wall - but he could hardly be an outsider at a party at which he was apparently both host and guest of honour, and there were worse ways of spending an afternoon than eating too much turkey and drinking too much port (especially when one considered the alternatives), even if he was too tired to join in with much of the conversation, and when his still-wasted muscles slackened and he started to sag, Hagrid was there ready, with surprizing sensitivity and tact, to prop him up.

Furthermore - another small triumph, another milestone reached and passed - he had managed to cut up his own dinner, using his wand and a slicing hex, without making a godawful mess of it. He was mildly irritated at how triumphant and independent and, ye gods, _grown up_ that made him feel.

He looked at the little group of - students, for God's sake, students were always The Enemy, even when he was one, but somehow these were allies, friends even - Granger, Longbottom and four strapping Slytherin sixth- and seventh-years - Bulstrode, Heggarty, Longchamps, Fitzgordon - who he knew had all stayed over Christmas expressly so they could continue to guard him, a fact which amazed him every time he thought about it. Crabbe and Goyle, too, but they had eaten upstairs with Pomona and Argus and the rest, out of regard for the effect which their too-vivid resemblance to their fathers might have on his nerves, and then taken up their posts in the corridor. He felt guilty about their necessary exclusion, but grateful for their tact.

And Potter, of course. Sitting there looking awkward and vaguely sullen, parked between Granger and Longbottom. As his gaze passed across them Hermione (Granger, he told himself firmly, Granger) looked up and smiled and he smiled back, thinking "I'm smiling at a student! - it must be the port" - but they weren't just students any more, none of them, not even Potter - a constant thorn in his side and a reminder of his own guilt but he owed the bloody boy his life and the son, unlike the father, had had no conceivable ulterior motive in saving it, even Potter was an ally of sorts so as his gaze slid across the boy's he made a supreme effort and managed - OK, not a smile, definitely not a smile, but the mild interrogative quirk of an eyebrow and a polite tilt of the head, and Potter frowned for an instant and then nodded back.

If somebody had told him a year ago that he would be entertaining Harry Potter in his own quarters, and being tolerably civil to him, he would have thought they were mad. But if somebody had told him six months ago that he would be spending Christmas enjoying (tolerating, anyway) a social gathering, alive and comparatively pain-free instead of - oh, God, he didn't want to think about the alternatives, but at least he seemed to be firmly in the right timeline, he still had a hand, and sight, and the warm room didn't seem to be about to dissolve away into nightmare (please stay real; please, please let it be real).

"I brung yeh some - some sloe gin," Hagrid said expansively, brandishing a massive slice of Christmas cake. "'S not much, I know, but I made it m'self."

That meant it would be about a hundred and forty proof, and almost lethal. "Thank you, Rubeus," Snape said gravely, staring into the ruby depths of the port. "I do appreciate it. I'm only sorry that my - disabilities have prevented me from returning the favour." As if buying presents for anybody except his godson - or receiving them from anybody except Albus - was a thing he had ever contemplated doing before. "Next year, perhaps."

"That's all right, Severus dear," Poppy said from behind him, her voice blurry with sherry. "Jus' - just having you back with us is enough of a Christmas present."

His hand started to shake. He watched it, clinically, from what felt like a great distance as the shaking grew wilder and more convulsive, as his teeth started to chatter, as the port spilled over the back of his white hand and pooled on the sheets like blood and the glass shattered in his grip and real blood followed it...

He heard Minerva calling his name from a long way away, but he only knew that he had fainted when he came round again to find Hagrid holding him up while Poppy rather fuzzily cleaned and healed the cuts on his fingers, and everybody else chattered anxiously. He lifted his head, trying to shake off the dizziness, and found himself facing Potter's green-glass gaze, so like and so unlike Lily's. The boy looked thoughtful and vaguely pitying and Snape turned his face away, ashamed of his own weakness.

"Severus," Minerva's voice said again, clearly. "Severus, what happened? Are you..." all right, she nearly said, but that was a ridiculous question.

"I - I'm not - " He took a deep breath, inhaling the dreamy scent of hyacinths and the unmistakable leather-and-armpits smell of Hagrid. Everything appeared to be moving far too slowly and his own voice seemed to come from a long way away.

"Severus? What is it?"

Another breath, his eyes fixed on the Headmaster although it was Minerva he was answering. "I was to be... they told me I was to be Albus's Christmas gift. If I hadn't weakened faster than they expected. When they had - cut everything off me that could be cut without killing me, what was left was to be impaled and, and sliced open and set up on the lawn, with a silencing charm on me - knowing them, probably with a bloody Tarantallegra as well, so I couldn't even minimize the pain by keeping still." He flinched, shut his eyes, forced himself to open them again. "The _Silencio_ was to have been set to end at dawn, so that - so that my screams would wake the school on Christmas morning."

Minerva made a sick sound and she was in good company, there were expressions of horror all round and in another life, perhaps, he would have enjoyed shocking them all but Albus only looked back at him with quiet concern, and Hagrid's warm, furry voice at his ear said "Tha' part'd neh'v've happened, not 'less they sealed yeh in a bubble. Fang'd've smelled yeh at once, if they'd brought yeh in on that side o' the school injured, an' I'd've found yeh in ten minutes, tops. In fact 'sa wonder the squid didn' intercept yeh, if yeh came in ov'r th' lake."

Snape shook his head violently, trying to clear his thoughts. "That's - interesting question. The giant squid is forbidden from eating students but you'd think that it would..." Sallow-white though he already was, he paled visibly. "Dear God. Could it have been students who...?"

"Oh Severus - what an awful thought!" Minerva said, paling herself. "But perhaps the squid was just... sleeping. I suppose it does sleep?"

"Dunno," Hagrid replied thoughtfully. "I'll have teh ask him."

Feeling tired and faint and slightly the worse for alcohol, Snape settled back against the half-giant's warm, hairy bulk and let the conversation wash over and past him. The idea that it might have been current students, students who were still at the school, who had connived at his torture and ferried his broken body across the loch was horrifying - and yet as he fell asleep in Hagrid's arms he felt oddly soothed to think that if the worst had happened, if the bare remnant of his still-suffering corpse really had been set up like a horrible banner on the lawn on a cold Christmas morning, those same strong arms would have enfolded him in minutes, and carried him in to the warmth and kindness of the infirmary. To know that kindness, perhaps, had always been waiting for him at the end of pain.

* * *

**Author's note:**

Note that there is nothing dodgy about Snape enjoying the prospect of Hermione nearly naked. The age of sexual consent in Muggle Britain is sixteen and the age of full majority eighteen. The age of full adulthood in the wizarding world is seventeen. Hermione is legally eighteen years and three months old and really, allowing for her use of the time-turner, she must be at least eighteen and a half, maybe more. And Snape isn't her teacher at this point - he's her patient.

To the anonymous reviewer who thought that "yus kin" was an American contraction followed by the Scandinavian (or Scots) word "ken," rather than a Derbyshire regional contraction of "You is kin to me": I too would have thought the "kin" in "yus kin" was related to the Scots "ken", "to know", but my informant is a native Derbyshire man, an actor and an author with a great interest in words, so he ought to know far better than you or me. And of course that kind of dialect contraction "yus" for "you is" sounds vaguely American, because so much of what we think of as American English is derived from English and Scots regional dialects, rather than from standard English.

This chapter has been slightly re-edited to point up the fact that Albus had formerly been quite dismissive of Snape's problems, and that Harry's presence makes Snape remember Lily, in order to bring it in line with the new canon backstory in _Deathly Hallows_.

The conversation between Snape and Flitwick about fitting him for prostheses has been re-edited to add comments about Sylvanus Kettleburn, Hagrid's predecessor as Care of Magical Creatures master. It was mentioned _en passant_ in _The Tales of Beedle the Bard_ that Professor Kettleburn had had only one and a half natural limbs left during the whole of the time that he worked for Dumbledore, so it seemed natural that Snape, being similarly maimed, would think about his former colleague.

**STOP PRESS**: **duj** has written a poem called _Attribute/A Tribute_ to accompany this chapter, which can be found at story ID 2957617. It is based around the structure of Emily Dickinson's poem _Pain_ (but IMO is more powerful) and shows Snape struggling to deal with the weight of memory. The court referred to in the poem is his own self-judgement.


	11. 09 Matters Arising

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**9: MATTERS ARISING**

"It's not impossible, is it Albus? Why, even in my own schooldays there were students who were willing to torture and murder for amusement - as you well know."

"I did _tell_ Harry, as early as first year, that you felt about his father the same way he felt about Draco Malfoy, you know - but he thrust it out of his mind. Or twisted it around, perhaps, and assumed that you had been in Draco's position, and his father in his. He does so _hate_ to think ill of James."

"He's not the only one, is he Albus? You persist in going all dewy-eyed over the bastard and his tragic fate, but he was a snotty, arrogant, spiteful little shit and you know it - a spoilt little pure-blood strutting around the school with his pack of hand-picked bullies, looking for someone to torment. Me, usually."

"Indeed. He was very much like young Mr Malfoy in many ways, and yet you always assure me that that young gentleman has - other qualities, which militate against his faults. If I allow you your predilection for Draco, dear boy, you must surely allow me mine for James."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Between Christmas and New Year, a whole gaggle of his Slytherin geese came back to Hogwarts early, in order to resume guarding him. Snape wasn't sure whether to feel flattered or cringingly embarrassed, as family celebration after family celebration was cut short for his sour sake.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Severus, my boy, it's ah... to see you" the fat man finished lamely, obviously unable to say _what_ it was. "Albus has assured me that you, ah... that he will probably only need me until the summer." He blinked his waterylight-green eyes at the wreckage of what had once been his star pupil, visibly trying not to wince.

"Albus is an over-optimistic old fool, Horace, as you well know. Do I look to you like someone who will be able to resume teaching in September?"

"Well, ah, well, I'm not entirely fit m'self, you know, and Filius tells me - that is - "

"I'll believe it when I see it; all he's done so far is measure me, and mutter to himself in corners. Should I be flattered that you're taking such an interest in my future health - even though I know it's only because you want to know how soon you can sink back into your comfortable retirement?"

"It isn't - only that," the other replied, helping himself to a chocolate liqueur.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"He's - not an unkind man, I suppose, Albus," Snape muttered, leaning against his friend's rather bony side. "He _means well_, to use a dreadful phrase, and I'm even prepared to believe the old bastard has some genuine fondness for me, as strange as that seems - but let us just say that I based most of my style as Head of House on thinking about what Horace Slughorn would do, and then not doing it."

"He's a competent teacher."

"Oh, on a longish hook. Admit it - you only asked him here because you think you'll be able to pump his brains about - about Riddle. If you can _find_ his brains."

"I'll admit," Dumbledore said with a faint smile, "that it seemed economical to - kill two birds with one stone." And thought, but did not say, _three_ birds - you'll get better so much faster, dear boy, if you think he's not doing a good job with your precious classes...

"And how is dearest Alastor panning out - or shouldn't I ask?"

"Not too well, I'm afraid - the older students who remember the false Moody find him disturbing, and he's never been exactly - well. You know what I mean."

"Not the most rational and balanced of wizards, no. And I always find him disturbing. His relentless and obvious distrust of me is - is mortifying." He shut his eyes, but his face did not relax; hard lines of pain and bitterness still bracketing his mouth. "I note that he's the only member of staff who hasn't been to - to visit me."

His long lips twitched upwards slightly. "Even Mrs Norris came in the other day and pilfered a kipper. I suppose I should be grateful that Alastor's suspicion of me keeps him away, since I really don't want him anywhere near me; but it still - eats at me."

"Not so suspicious since..."

"Since my supposed bloody - _Master_ had me violated and crippled and thrown back like a piece of rubbish."

"If you want to put it that way. It's guilt rather than suspicion which keeps him away, I think - guilt for having doubted you, and for - well."

"Because he connived in my being tortured by his fellow bloody Aurors when I was in Azkaban."

"Yes... you'll understand, under the circumstances, he feels very... disturbed by his own actions."

"Serves the paranoid old bastard right - if he runs out of nightmares, I have a few hundred he can have with my blessing."

"That's as may be, but at least he is an excellent person to have around as far as warding this castle and you from further attacks goes."

"He's an efficiently paranoid old bastard, I'll give him that."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"So," said Hermione, nibbling absent-mindedly on the end of her quill, "if we're going to go ahead and celebrate Professor Snape's birthday, what kind of cake should we get him?"

"Not a birthday cake," Luna said firmly; "not the sort you put candles on anyway. You don't want to make him think you're treating him like a child; even though you are."

In the end, and after much consultation with the house-elves, they settled on a slightly alcoholic version of a chocolate fudge cake, laced with Bailey's Irish Cream. The house elves were delighted at the chance to do something nice for Professor Snape, and promised to produce a suitably subdued and adult birthday tea. Nothing ostentatious, they promised Hermione, just something a little nicer than usual.

A birthday present was more difficult. Eventually Hermione referred to her "Ways to Help Professor Snape" list, was reminded that #3 was "provide new reading material" and settled on a book - newly published, so she was sure he wouldn't have it, and it was described as possessing a "bold new interpretation" of several traditional potions, so he'd probably find lots of places to find fault. She agonized for hours over whether to inscribe it, and eventually settled on a card. That way he could ignore who had given him the book, if he wanted to.

Christmas hadn't helped her burgeoning... thing... for him at all. He'd looked so handsome, to her biased eyes, sitting up in his new robes, talking and even smiling a little. (At her! Her heart had pounded for twenty minutes on the strength of that small smile.) He'd even been civil to Harry, and she'd been so proud of both of them that she could have burst. For the first time, it had occurred to her that the two of them were alike, at least insofar as it came to how she felt about them. Prickly, lonely, prone to fits of temper when it was really themselves they were angry with - and they both inspired in her a fierce, exasperated affection and a desire to protect them from the dangers they persisted in courting. The only difference was that Harry was like an annoying, adored younger brother, and her feelings for Severus Snape were about as far from sisterly as it was possible to get.

When he'd collapsed, and again when he had described the ghastly fate which the Death Eaters had planned for him, it had taken all her resolve not to rush to his side, to push Hagrid away so she could hold him herself. The urge to go to him had been so strong that she hadn't dared move, holding onto her seat with a white-knuckled grip until she was sure she could trust herself again. She hadn't been really happy until it was her turn to spend the night again, and she'd been able to spend most of the night holding him and watching him sleep.

Even the most stern talking-to, delivered to herself _via_ the mirror, couldn't dent her feelings for him, even when she'd started doing them daily. Lists had been similarly ineffective. Lately, she hadn't even bothered to try.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Three gifts awaited Snape when he woke on his birthday... a large green tin, a small box and a book, perched on the end of his bed. Seeing them there, he felt momentarily baffled, as if he had blundered into someone else's life, and then a bubble of ridiculous hope lodged itself in his chest. Feeling frivolous and skittish and more than slightly silly, he settled down to examine the first birthday presents he had received for over thirty years.

The tin, when investigated, opened easily with one hand and contained a small mountain of iced fancies decorated in green and silver. He would have recognized Molly's baking even without the card. By way of a pleasant surprise, all the cakes were identical on the outside, but different flavours within; he located an orange cake and a coffee one before putting the rest aside for later.

The box was from Neville Longbottom, according to the card, and contained several blown-glass bottles - which, when opened, turned out to contain distilled essential oils. Lavender, neroli, rose, ginger and thyme - all traditional for use against stress, fear, anxiety and exhaustion. The oils were perfectly and delicately prepared, definitely above the usual standard - where had the boy found them?

The book was new to him. _Antipodean Antidotes: Magical Flora of Australia and New Zealand_, by Barry Buckley. A small card had been tucked inside it - a rather nice rendition of a flowering thyme plant and a wish for a happy birthday from Hermione Granger. Trite, but not an entirely unwelcome sentiment - unlikely though happiness was, the wish was probably a sincere one.

"I have a present for you too," Luna said cheerfully, when he'd finished examining the unexpected bounty at the foot of his bed. She had been the one to spend the night, that night, and she leaned off the bed to rummage underneath it. "Here!"

Snape stared at the string of large, brilliantly blue glass beads she was holding out to him. "What are they for?" he asked, taking them politely.

"Averting the Evil Eye." Luna gave him her brightest and dottiest smile. "And they hold protective charms quite well, too." The beads were, in fact, carefully engraved with protective runes, which must have taken hours. Oddly touched, Snape allowed her to hang them over the head of his bed... down the back and out of sight, though.

She was relieved by Albus Dumbledore, who brought a small wrapped package himself. "Sometimes," he observed, watching Snape cut the string, "the most useful gift is one which is entirely useless."

"That's a particularly incoherent piece of wisdom, even from you," Snape muttered, tearing the paper off to expose a small, spidery silver mechanism. "This is one of the pieces from your office, isn't it?"

"Oh yes," Albus said happily. "And not, I fear, one of the most useful. I have so far successfully used it to calculate the precise number of my nose hairs, the exact level of my taste for sherbet lemons, and the number of socks which I have lost over the last hundred years. It may have other uses, but I doubt they are any more practical. It is amusing to tinker with, however... and I'm sure that if it has any practical application, you will be able to find it."

After spending some time fiddling with the machine given to him by Albus (it really was fascinating - there were several parts that only existed some of the time), he was presented with another surprise. A birthday tea, complete with an apparently alcoholic chocolate cake. Snape privately thought that it reminded him of Bellatrix - rich, dark and thick. Poppy dropped in, bringing her own gift - a nightshirt of cotton woven with silk, soft and light and very comfortable. Most of his regular caretakers appeared, and several of the other teachers dropped in at least briefly. Neville hovered rather protectively over him, while Hermione (Granger) presided over the tea things, giving him fond, approving looks when she thought he wasn't looking.

Later, Minerva came in from her last Friday afternoon class with a dark bundle in her arms, which she unfurled across the bed in a heavy fall of soft wool: a warm over-blanket in a tartan woven all of soft blues and greens, shot through with narrow lines of red. "Mackinley Ancient," she said, seeing him run his thumb along the lines. "My mother's clan."

Snape quirked an eyebrow at her. "Not McGonagall?"

"There is no McGonagall tartan, I'm afraid. My mother comes from a long line of Scottish wizards and witches who can trace their ancestry back to the days of Michael Scott, but the McGonagalls are from Donegal - though my father's family have been in Scotland since the 1820s."

"I'm sure it will keep me just as warm, either way. I - thank you. Not just for..." Minerva nodded tightly, looking slightly sniffly, and put her hand over his where it lay against the dark pattern of the weave. Reassured by the human contact which he still needed so badly, Snape clasped her hand loosely and lay back against the pillows, idly watching Horace Slughorn scarfing Molly's iced fancies in the corner. It felt strange, when so many people in his life had told him that his mere existence was a crime - when he more than half thought that they were right to do so - to find that so many people seemed to want to celebrate the fact that he had made it through another year without dying. He couldn't make up his mind whether to be slavishly grateful to them, or despise them as fools. Thirty-eight years, and what had he to show for it?

And later still, Adrian came, bearing a memorable wine which had the taste of kindness and humanity about it, and Snape relaxed into the moment, finally, feeling all the hard knots of misery and self-disgust unravelling, just a little. Tomorrow they would be back as tight as ever, he knew it as he knew the sun would rise, but for tonight he could drink red wine and talk about Adrian's wedding plans, and make believe that he was a normal, worthwhile person with friends and a place in the world.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Please, please, I'm so tired, oh please, let me sleep..."

"You _are_ asleep, sir," Neville said gently. "Asleep, but you're dreaming. Come on now - it's just a dream..."

He put his hand on the man's shoulder, carefully, trying to establish a steadying contact, but his old nemesis flinched away as if the touch burned him, and began to twitch and jerk in the grip of some remembered torment. "Ah don't, don't, no, please - "

He twisted and retched, vomit spewing over the clean pillow, his sides heaving convulsively. Frowning, Neville performed a cleansing charm with a composure and competence which would have amazed the man, if he had been in any state to appreciate it.

"That's all right, now. I'm not going to hurt you. Come on now, come on..." Gradually, steadily, he talked Snape through the fit and back towards what passed for normality, though he could feel the man's heart hammering in his chest, and his skin was sheet-white and clammy with sweat.

Eventually, he was able to coax Snape to drink a little water, to clear away the taste of sickness. A while after that, Neville lay back down again, his hand resting on Snape's upper arm, and looked at the lines of strain etched around the man's eyes. Unfathomably black eyes - much too dark to see well in the low light of the dungeons, and so made all the blacker by the compensatory dilation of the pupils. Piercing eyes which had struck terror into him, once, but now they were wandering and distracted. It was so quiet that he could hear the faint, ragged edge to Snape's breathing, and Trevor rustling about under the bed, hoping for flies, and a little whistle of wind across the water.

A sudden gust rattled the window-panes, and Snape started slightly and came more into focus. He clutched at Neville's elbow and whispered hoarsely "Talk to me."

"What about, sir?"

The older man made a cracked, irritable noise, half scoff and half sob. "Whatever you usually talk about - how should I know? Anything, just - keep me focussed." His gaze started to wander again, restless and frightened-looking. "I can't - can't find me - "

"What I usually talk about, sir, if anyone wants to listen, is plants." He settled down happily, realizing that he had a captive audience. "I've got this theory, see, that plants which are _sui generis_, like _Equisetum_, or the last of their kind, like the Wollemi Pine, contain in themselves all the magical force which originally belonged to their whole line..."

"You mean - mean like a, an old, noble family which is dying out, and the family's titles become progressively more concentrated into the surviving scions?"

"Just like that, sir, yes..."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"You do realize, Longbottom, that it is 5 a.m. and we've been talking about plants for the last two hours?"

"Oh, I can talk about plants for a lot longer than that, sir - sorry, sir."

"Don't apologize, it was - surprizingly stimulating. I'll admit that I am impressed."

Neville beamed at him. "Thank you! That's - well. Coming from you... if you know what I mean, sir."

"Yes, well, Longbottom, that's all very well; but if you actually have a mind, however well-hidden, how come you've never applied it to Potions?"

"If there's such a thing as a brown thumb for Potions I think I must have it - I understand the theory, but the practice somehow goes all over, and it doesn't help if you shout at me. Really."

"If you didn't cringe so, I wouldn't shout so much."

"That's not very nice, then - sir. If seeing me scared makes you want to scare me more..."

"It's not that. Idiot. I have to - as a spy I have to pretend to be the Dark Lord's man, I have to, to hurt people for him, and they cringe from me and I just want to run but if I run it will be me on the slab - it _was_ me in the end - and I don't want to hurt them but I have to hurt them or I'm no good as a spy and the Dark Lord is breathing down my neck to see if I'm bloody-well evil enough for him and if I'm not I'll be dead, I'll wish I was bloody dead, and I just want to, to - when you cringe from me half of me wants to attack you, because that's what I'm conditioned to do, and the other half just wants to panic and run and neither of those things, believe me, is conducive to a calm and forgiving frame of mind."

"Oh. I'll... try not to then, shall I?"

"That would be helpful, yes."

"At least - you don't have to do they things any more."

"No." He leaned his head back and shut his eyes. "I have my freedom," he said, with a bitter twist to his mouth, "after a fashion - at the cost of every scrap of dignity and pride and bodily integrity I ever had. Not to mention being shut in this fucking - crippled - "

Neville patted him on the arm, gently. "Don't take on so, lad. Professor."

Snape opened his eyes again and gave the boy a sly, considering look. "You'll be a northerner yourself, then, Longbottom? I suppose with a name like that, you'd have to be."

"Oh yes, sir - proper Dalesman, me!"

"You're not a man of any kind quite yet, but you're getting there - provided you can manage not to blow yourself up in the interim."

"I'll do me best, then."

"It's your worst that worries me, Longbottom."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Poppy tells me that you've been feeling... distressed about your injuries?"

"Don't I have a right to be bloody distressed? I mean, Christ, _look_ at me - what there is bloody left of me." He shut his eyes and tilted his head back - not against the pillows but against the couch where he was sitting, fully clothed, with the Lovegood girl at his side and Minerva's warm tartan blanket to keep out the January chill, Poppy having decided that he was now well enough to get out of bed for an hour or two each day. It was a great innovation, but... "The, the stronger I feel, the more - able I become, in some ways, the more I want to do things, and the more I realize that I - can't."

"Loss of limb is always a tragedy, of course," Adrian said seriously, "but it needn't be the end of life as we know it. Muggles lose limbs all the time, and it doesn't slow them down much."

Snape's eyes snapped open again. "How? What are they doing - juggling axes?"

"Transport accidents, mostly. It's fairly common."

"Good grief - I've heard of splinching yourself, but that's ridiculous."

"What you have to understand, my boy," said Albus with his trademark twinkle, "is that most Muggle means of transportation are basically a tin-can propelled by explosives."

Snape stared at Adrian accusingly, trying to decide whether they were having him on. "Is this true?"

"Well, yeah. Broadly."

"I am never, _ever_ getting into a car ever again."

"That's probably very wise of you."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Don't fuss, Poppy - I'll be all right in a minute."

"I know you will, Severus dear - I have every confidence in you. I just - don't like to see you upset."

"You'd be 'upset' if you had to see - !" he snarled. After a sharp, splintering pause he dragged his ragged breathing back into line by main force of will, though his muscles were still rigid and shuddering.

"I'm quite upset enough to see what it's done to you, without seeing how it was done. Loosen that nightshirt and roll over, now" she said firmly.

"What are you going to do?"

"Calming Draughts may not work on you any more, but I know what will." Spreading a little warming and soothing oil on her hands, she began to press her strong thumbs into the angle between his neck and shoulders. "Besides, you need to work these muscles more, if you're going to be able to cope with Filius's prosthetics when they're ready." She leaned firmly into the task at hand, and after a minute or two Snape hissed gently and relaxed under her touch, flopped limply across the bed on his belly.

"Is that one of Longbottom's oils?" he asked with interest, recognizing the clean, delicate scent.

"Yes. I thought we might as well put them to work; they're very good, aren't they?"

"They're superb, I have to admit - I must ask him where he got them."

"Oh, didn't he tell you?" She paused, smiling, and gave his hair a gentle tug. "He made them himself - I know because he borrowed some of the equipment off me. I believe he even blew the glass himself. He'll be so pleased when I tell him what you said - and you can't possibly pretend you were just being polite, because you didn't know they were his own work. Quite apart from the fact that nobody would believe in you being polite."

"Gah." He arched his neck as her hands resumed their steady rhythm, loosening tightened muscle and tendons. "It isn't all - bad, you know," he said drowsily.

"What isn't, dear?"

"The - the dreams. That is - the dreams are - lacerating, terrifying, but when I wake from them it's such a sheer bloody relief to find that I am - that I am in a bed, and warm, and may sleep... oh, God. That I have water and may drink it. That I'm not - not crying with hunger any more, and that somebody is with me who isn't there to hurt me. I was - so tired, there. So very tired."

"You rest now, dear," the nurse replied, wiping her eyes surreptitiously. "You rest as much as you need."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

When Hermione woke it was still quite dark outside. The water stood high against the windows, and above it a hard January hail was whimpering and scratching against the glass like a stray dog; but the room was comfortably warm by firelight and Snape was curled at her side, solidly real and male. She turned her head and looked at him. His face was on the pillow only inches from hers, his eyes still shut and his expression peaceful although as she stirred the lines bracketing his thin mouth tightened and relaxed again, suggesting that he was partially awake. Fighting an embarrassing urge to lean over and kiss him, right there and then, she shifted again, getting herself more comfortable. His hand was draped loosely across her ribs, his single knee - what there was of it - touching the side of hers, but as she settled down against him she suddenly felt something... extra prodding her in the hip.

For a moment she blinked at him stupidly, too fuzzy with sleep to work it out. He half opened his eyes, made a soft dreamy "Auhmm..." noise and began to arch his back, pushing against her... then his eyes flew open all the way and he flamed abruptly scarlet and jerked away from her, heaving and thrashing and tangling himself in the bedclothes in his haste to turn his back on her.

Hermione blushed just as hard, shifting away as well as she could with him pulling on the sheet they were both tangled in. "Er... good morning," she said, then took a moment to kick herself with a bare foot. Of all the bloody silly things to say! If only she'd had her eyes shut and could have pretended to be asleep!

Snape drew a deep, steadying breath and dared to look at her out of the corner of his eye. Could it possibly be that she hadn't noticed anything? But he should have known that was too much to hope for in his bloody nightmare-farce of a bloody life; the blasted girl was as red as a beetroot. He wrapped his arm across his face and pulled his head down between his shoulders like a tortoise in sheer mortification. Took another deep breath. "Miss Granger - " he began in a rather choked voice, and then stopped, not knowing what the Hell else to say.

"Um..." Hermione stared up at the ceiling. She too had no idea what to say. Something soothing was certainly called for. Something reassuring and respectful of his dignity. Indicating that she had actively wished to incite that sort of response almost certainly wasn't it. "Did you sleep well?"

That wasn't it either. Damn. How on earth did one say "Look, I couldn't help but notice your involuntary physical reaction, but it's quite all right really" in a tactful way?

Snape mumbled something indistinct, which Hermione was quite unable to make out.

"I'm sorry, I..."

"I _said_," he snarled, twisting his head and upper body round to half face her, whilst keeping his pelvis resolutely turned away, "all except for the last five bloody minutes, all bloody right? I should have thought that was bloody self-evident."

"Well, yes," Hermione admitted, blushing harder than ever. "I just... uhm... wasn't sure what to say. Er. I know it's a quite involuntary physical reaction, it's all right, honestly..."

"And you're such a bloody expert, of course Granger," he snapped. "You always bloody are." He hesitated, and thought about that one for a moment, curiosity warring with embarrassment. "_Are_ you an expert? I know Addy said Harry said he was the only virgin - um..." He blushed again, and winced slightly, uncertain which was worse at this point: the idea of Hermione (Granger!) being a virgin, or the idea of her not being.

"Er... no..." Hermione confessed in a tiny voice. "I didn't even hear them asking about that, I was trying to talk on the 'phone at The Burrow through the fire in the infirmary." She continued staring firmly at the ceiling. "I've not had the heart to tell Harry that he wasn't the only one, though, after he got so embarrassed about it in front of everyone."

"I shouldn't laugh," Snape said, laughing, "but it's the only part of my own bloody - immolation that I'm sorry I missed. Addy said Albus actually asked him whether he had 'indulged in the pleasures of the flesh - in company.'" And wasn't that a stupid thing to have thought about - but he had an excuse for being stupid, since all his blood seemed to have migrated south and left his head full of cotton-wool. He gritted his teeth. "Look Granger I really - need to be on my own for a bit, all right? Not - not for long, just - a few minutes." A few _seconds_, possibly. At least his magic should be up to cleaning up after - oh, God. He clenched his teeth again, trying not to whimper.

"I'll - ah - go and take a shower then, shall I?"

"You do that." He burrowed his face down into the pillows, going even redder if possible. The mental image of Hermione Granger stark naked and covered in soap really wasn't helping matters.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"It may be a 'good sign' in principle," he said morosely, "but I sincerely hope it won't become a regular occurrence. Poppy would be brisk and clinical about it, which would be just about tolerable - but after months of needing someone with me round the clock if I have to tell Albus that suddenly I want to be on my own for ten minutes first thing in the morning he's going to twinkle horribly."

"Ouch. And telling Professor McGonagall would be even worse."

"It would - but probably not for the reasons you're thinking. She'd be roguish about it. You have no idea what an... _active_ girl she was when she was your age, if half her stories are to be believed. It was 1954, she was eighteen, Britain was full of Teddy Boys and so, according to her, was she. And Longbottom will be aggravatingly placid and knowing about it, and Lovegood will lecture me about the necessity of maintaining the health of my basal chakra. Whatever that is."

Keeping her face straight was NOT easy, at that last thought. "If you want me to, I can always retreat to the loo for ten minutes," she offered. "Or help you do the same. It's... very flattering, actually. I don't get that response often." She paused, and went pink. "And in the spirit of honesty, I do sometimes have to... er... have ten private minutes after spending the night snuggled up to you. It's just less obvious on me."

Snape coughed and went equally pink. "Now that is rather flattering - I mean men tend to um in any case, not that - not that your presence wasn't a very major contributory factor, but often it's just a circulatory thing - at least it shows my blood pressure is getting back to normal! - and even when it's associated with real, ah, interest men do tend to dream about things they associate with being... well, aroused. I'm terrified I might start waking up like that because I was dreaming about - about being used - that way - but waking up feeling _interested_ because a pretty girl is cuddled up to me with her hair all over the pillow is rather - nice. If embarrassing. And it's nice to know you feel the same."

"I do. Believe me. Although if the hair is bothering you, I can plait it or something. And... I'm glad I help, with the being interested, and... I'm going to be quiet now."

"I like your hair the way it is. It smells nice, and waking up in a cloud of coconut-scented brown fuzz is - reassuring. If a bit tickly."

* * *

**Author's note:**

**duj** has written a poem called _Attribute/A Tribute_ to accompany the previous chapter, _What Hermione Did Next_. It can be found at story ID 2957617. It is based around the structure of Emily Dickinson's poem _Pain_ (but IMO is more powerful) and shows Snape struggling to deal with the weight of memory. The court referred to in the poem is his own self-judgement.

"...family celebration after family celebration was cut short for his sour sake" - to do something for somebody's sweet sake is a traditional British expression, but Snape doesn't _have_ a "sweet" sake...

Chocolate fudge cake, in case anybody doesn't know, is a rich moist chocolate sponge-cake, with a half-inch thick layer of mega-rich chocolate cream filling and another ditto on top.

Michael Scott was a famous Scottish philosopher, alchemist and astronomer of the early 13th Century, traditionally believed to have been a powerful wizard.

_Equisetum_ or Horsetail is any one of a group of sixteen related species of weird looking, ancient ferns of the once-flourishing class **Sphenopsida** (the sole member of the subdivision **Sphenophytina**), which dates back over 350 million years to the late Devonian period but is now confined to a single Order (**Equisetales**), a single family (**Equisetaceae**) and a single genus (_Equisetum_). Although Horsetails are in a sense "living fossils" there's nothing fragile or endangered about them - they are virulent, vigorous and nearly indestructible.

The Wollemi Pine or Chocolate Pine is _Wollemia nobilis_, a species of conifer related to the monkey-puzzle tree. It closely resembles trees known to have been abundant in the Jurassic about 150-200 million years ago, but which disappeared from the fossil record around 90 million years ago - although samples of pollen ranging from the Cretaceous up to 2 million years ago are now thought to have come from the Wollemi Pine, or a close relative. In 1994, a small stand of this tree was found still living in New South Wales. It is the only member of its genus. There are thought to be less than a hundred mature trees surviving in the wild, split between three stands, and they are all genetically identical clones of a single plant. In genetic terms, therefore, there is in effect just one surviving tree - but saplings are now being cultivated and sold to gardeners all over the world, so the Wollemi Pine will soon be very common again (although you'd need a really big garden - they grow up to 130 feet tall).

It is very common for men to wake up with an erection, occasionally due to erotic dreams but far more commonly believed to be due either to circulatory changes during sleep, or a full bladder, or both. Opinions seem to vary as to whether they experience this as actual sexual arousal or not; basically some do and some don't. I thought that Snape, who at this point has been remembering suffering a great deal of unwanted sexual stimulation without any positive outlet, and has then woken up to find himself in bed snuggled up to a personable eighteen-year-old girl, probably would.

Chakras are a chain of seven energy foci spaced out along the spine from the tailbone to the crown of the head, originating in Far Eastern medical theory and philosophy and supposedly seen/sensed by reiki practitioners and other psychics. The basal chakra, the one at the tailbone, is said to be linked to the sexual organs.

Snape's age has been reduced from thirty-nine to thirty-eight, to comply with the new canon backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_.


	12. 10 Secret Admirers

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**10: SECRET ADMIRERS**

There was another reason why he hoped that that particular morning wake-up call would not become a regular occurrence. Waking up like that next to Hermione had been one thing - a moment of spontaneous pleasure; of grace, even, however embarrassing. But discreet experiment in the shower (itself a necessity, now, since cleansing charms could not combat the sweaty stickiness brought on by enforced bed-rest) showed him that his own reaction to sexual climax was now dangerously unpredictable. At some times it was a pleasant palliative, easing the rheumatic ache which prolonged exposure to the Cruciatus had bitten into his bones; at others it brought a flood of darkness and the memory of being tossed back and forth between his attackers like a rag-doll, forced into an answering, shaming response he hated but could do nothing to prevent.

There was no predicting what would bring on that rush of darkness, which he thought of as a kind of psychological equivalent of raw sewage. Things that seemed harmless to him today might snag some trailing thread of memory tomorrow and trigger an attack. Since he could do nothing to prevent it there was, on the one hand, little point in worrying about it - on the other, the inevitability of terror, his inability to control his own emotions, fed into his sense of helplessness and bitter self-disgust.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Of course, this is only a prototype" Filius said fussily, standing on tiptoe to adjust the straps which held the wooden arm in place. "When it's finished we should be able to dispense with the harness."

"_We_ should be very glad to do so," Snape said sourly, "since _we_ have no desire to go around looking like some sort of exotic pervert."

"Why, Severus," purred Minerva, whose turn it was to sit with him, "I had no idea you were planning to appear before the school bare-chested." He glared at her, and she smiled back in what he considered to be an offensively bland way. "Do let me know in advance - I could make a fortune selling tickets."

Filius Flitwick made an inelegant snorting noise, which he turned into a spluttering cough. Snape glowered at them both. "When you've quite finished amusing yourselves at my expense..."

But there was no real malice in him, not today. Most of the time, he could trick himself into not noticing the absence where his left arm should be, but seeing a thing there which was so clearly not natural flesh was horribly disturbing, and Minerva's teasing at least distracted him from feeling sick - the devious cat.

"How does that feel?" the little Charms master asked, tapping the prosthetic arm with his wand to activate it. "More to the point, does it feel?"

It took several minutes to remember how to move the wasted muscles of his shoulder as if he had an arm again, and to convince his nervous system that this wooden outgrowth was connected to it. Snape was sweating by the time he had managed to move the thing in a clumsy wave, which ended with the hand striking against the edge of the couch with a dull _thunk_. "Hard to tell" he said through clenched teeth, breathing hard. "I think - think I can feel something in the hand itself, not just pressure on my shoulder, but it's hard to be sure."

Minerva stood up and folded down, flowing into herself and reshaping like water, and the rangy grey tabby which was left in her place reared up and dug a pawful of claws lightly into the back of the willow-wood hand. Snape jumped slightly and jerked the hand away. "I did feel that, a little - I wouldn't say that it hurt but I did feel pressure."

"That's very good," Filius said, as the tabby flowed back into a woman, and he held up a drinking-glass in front of his patient. "Try and grasp this, now."

With an effort of will, Snape managed to move the false hand towards the glass, clumsily, jerkily, but the creamy willow-wood was heavy and he over-reached, knocking the vessel from his former colleague's hand and smashing it on the cold stone floor. He stared at the debris dumbly, feeling like weeping, but Filius patted him on the shoulder. "It's a good start, Severus," he said as he reconstituted the glass with a flick of his wand. "We just need to work on it."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"What is it? What's happened?" Luna said sharply, her usual vagueness forgotten.

Neville looked up briefly. "Oh, hello. Professor Snape - a bit of soot from the chimney got into his glass and he thought the water was - well - " He held the shuddering man in his arms, firmly but gently. "Breathe now, sir, that's it..."

"He thought it was something dirty or poisonous" she said calmly. "He's going to faint in a minute - he needs to put his head between his knees." Snape made a convulsive movement at that, trying to draw breath to say something suitably scathing, but she sat down next to him on the bed, on the other side from Neville, and put her arms round him, bracing him so that he could lean forwards without collapsing.

Neville saw what she was doing and shifted so that his knee was almost touching hers and they supported Snape between them, so that he could lean forwards over their twin knees with his head bowed, biting back nausea and waiting for the world to stop spinning. "God," he said bitterly, when be could trust himself to speak, "what a bloody pathetic excuse for a human being you must think me."

"That's all right," Luna said, stroking his bent back. "Remember what Schmendrick the Magician said: _'Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed'_." Sunny and unruffled, she caught Neville's eye and smiled.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Not only could he not predict or prevent the sudden onrush of panic; not only did he find Filius's work on the prosthesis as much disturbing as encouraging; he also didn't know how to behave around the Granger girl any more. It was - flattering to think that she still registered him as male enough to find sharing a bed with him potentially erotic despite knowing what had been done to him; but the concept was disturbing on so many levels.

The idea of anybody, but especially a student, viewing him in a potentially sexual way was disturbing in itself; terrifying and exhilarating by turns, but the last thing he wanted to do was to make a fool of himself and lay himself open to further humiliation by fixating on her; quite apart from the ethical issues it would raise. Yet his reaction to her, he knew, had not simply been because she was female - Lovegood roused no such response, but in Granger's case he had now had occasion several times to be grateful for her tact and discretion of a morning.

He was worried about the girl, anyway. Amazing though it might be, in a Gryffindor and a friend of Potter's, he had to admit that the chit had a good brain (and just because he acknowledged that fact didn't mean he had to do anything so juvenile and hopeless as "fancy" her). The only reason she had not been made Head Girl this year was to allow her time to do the extra studying needed to go for Special Merit in her NEWTs, and yet here she was, spending an inordinate amount of time looking after his worthless carcase. But at least he could return the favour by making her free of his books (well, most of them) and talking through her essays with her.

So he was polite, almost cordial towards her (at least by his standards), but always strictly professional, at least when he wasn't raving in the grip of the latest nightmare. Reading through obscure Arithmancy texts with her meant that he seldom had to meet her eye; a welcome relief, since now he was the one who flushed scarlet whenever his traitor memory reminded him of how she had looked standing in his bathroom-doorway, mother-naked except for a one-handed fistful of towel.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

This time, it was Luna who had spent the night, and Neville who came to relieve her. Snape seemed calm enough, if rather strained. Neville helped him to get to the lavatory, and then the shower, and then he and Luna sat and talked quietly over the sound of running water. While they were there, Hermione came in, having made a detour on her way to breakfast.

When Snape was done Neville helped him from the shower, using a combination of brute force and Mobilicorpus. "Miss Granger" Snape said, politely, not quite smiling. Hermione brandished a parchment, looking slightly flustered.

"I was wondering - if you were up which, of course, you are - only there's one point about the use of ice-egg runes which I'm not quite clear on, and I have to hand this essay in this morning."

"Friday the thirteenth" Neville said with a grin; "that's not a very good date for it. You might only get 'Exceeds Expectations' instead of 'Outstanding'."

"Don't joke," Luna said solemnly. "Everyone knows that Friday the Thirteenth is the day when the gates of reality open - and today is a very special day, anyway."

"And why is that?" Snape said, rolling his eyes slightly in expectation of some weirdness or other. "Apart from being the day before bloody stupid Valentine's Day - at least we don't have to endure Lockhart and his yodelling dwarves any more."

"Not just that," the blond girl said seriously, "although we do need to be concerned about the Ministry's plans to contaminate Honeydukes' Sugar Roses with a love-potion targeted on Minister Scrimgeour. But today is your anniversary; it's four months since you came back to us, so now you've been free for as long as you were a prisoner."

Snape stared at her in shock, his mouth working. Neville felt almost equally disturbed; the months since Snape had been returned to them seemed so long, and the thought that he had spent a similar length of time in such relentless agony was horrifying. And now the man was shaking, folding forwards and then sideways onto the bed with his arm clutched across his stomach, white-faced and running with sweat.

Hermione knelt down on the floor in front of him and took his hand in hers, gazing anxiously at his face. "Professor - sir. What is it? Can you tell me?"

"C-cut me open," he gasped through chattering teeth, "_used_ me and then left, left me there in the dark and I c-couldn't call for help and it hurt, it hurt so much and I couldn't scream, they wouldn't let me scream and I can't stop remembering oh God it hurts - "

"Shhh now, hush, it was all healed, there's no cut there now, we found you, remember, and you're quite safe..." She folded him rather awkwardly in her arms, her face pressed against his still-damp hair, and stroked his back just as Luna had done; but Neville noted that she, unlike Luna, had eyes only for Snape.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

He had withdrawn from her, just a little, since That Morning. She couldn't blame him - it must have been as utterly mortifying for him as it was for her, and without the leavening pleasure which she had had of knowing he did, at least, notice she was a girl. She tried to match his dignified semi-formality but it was getting increasingly difficult - he would persist in being brilliant and approachable and oddly, wearily humorous.

She measured her Charms essay and frowned. Half an inch too short. She'd included all the relevant information, and Professor Snape had made a suggestion that had led her to what she thought was an interesting and creative conclusion on the use of Brightening Charms. But it was still too short, mostly because a not un-Snape-like little voice in the back of her mind had started voicing snide criticisms whenever she wandered off-topic or padded her essays with unnecessary information. Surely Professor Flitwick would forgive her a mere half-inch? He knew she was busy with much more important things than school-work.

Setting the Charms essay aside, she reached for her exercise book and opened it to the most recent list: "Daft Things I Find Myself Doing Because of Him".

_1. Attempting to write sonnet - not very good._  
_2. Watching him sleep - ongoing._  
_3. Having dreams about him - irregular but ongoing._  
_4. Running out of bathroom naked except for towel - mortifying._  
_5. Regular Ten Minutes in Bathroom - ditto._  
_6. Using homework as pretext to see him even when it's not my turn - must stop, will arouse suspicion._

With a sigh, she picked up her quill again and added another point.

_7. Making valentine I will never have the nerve to give him - irrational, but couldn't help myself._

Admittedly, it had been marginally more productive than either worrying about him or daydreaming over him, but only insofar as she now had a basic grasp of the art of flower-pressing. And how to steal some of Lavender's tacky silver ink without her noticing.

Hermione set down her quill and dropped her forehead to the table. "Hermione Granger, you are as silly as Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil put together," she told herself aloud. "I thought you had more sense, and I'm heartily ashamed of you."

It didn't work. It never did. Drat the man.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Although the Lovegood girl's casual comment about his "anniversary" had triggered a particularly disturbing flashback, still it made him feel that he had somehow progressed to a new stage of what he was now grudgingly prepared to think of as his recovery. He could even stand to have people look at him, now, without brooding all the time about the revulsion which they must feel.

Which, of course, was why he was now making astonishingly polite conversation with Arthur Weasley; a man whose kindness was so well known that Snape was cautiously prepared to accept his concern at face value.

"It was very good of you to come, Arthur - and now, I have something for you in return."

"Severus! There's no need, really."

"Oh, I wouldn't insult you with a material gift - even if I had the money for one, which I haven't." He gave the other man one of his oblique smirks. "No, I have something much better for you - I've found out what makes Muggle vehicles go."

"Gosh, really? What?"

"Explosives."

"... what?"

"Apparently Muggles lose limbs in the things all the time."

"Good heavens! Are you sure?"

"Well - so Adrian says, and I'm nearly sure I believe him."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"So," Neville said cosily, as he helped Snape to sit up and change into his day-robes, "what about you and Hermione, then?"

"What _about_ me and Hermione?"

"You do know she's mad about you, right?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Longbottom."

"You mean, you really haven't noticed?"

"Don't play games with me," the older man snapped, "and wipe that smug look off your face. _What_ haven't I noticed?"

"Well, she can't take her eyes off you, can she?" Neville smiled fondly at him. "Luna's noticed, too - when you're in the room, Hermione can't pay attention to anything else even for a minute."

"And it hasn't occurred to you that she might just be - wary of me? Most people are, you know. Or - " He put his hand up, almost unconsciously, and touched the still-noticeable scar which ran from the corner of his mouth nearly to his ear. "I imagine that _these_ exert the same kind of ghastly fascination as a bad Quidditch accident."

"Oh, no... wary is how she looks at me in Potions, I know that when I see it. She gets all sort of soft when she looks at you." Neville frowned a little. "Maybe I shouldn't've said anything... I just thought, from the way you look at her when she's not looking, and the way she looks at YOU, that you might... well... like to know."

"And exactly what way do I look at her, Longbottom?" Snape said sharply. "Think very carefully before you answer."

"As if she's beautiful," Neville said simply. "And a bit confusing, sometimes. But girls are, usually."

"I was under the impression that you found most things in life confusing, Longbottom," Snape said sourly. "Surely you must be aware that men do look at attractive girls without it - meaning anything. Other than that they are male."

"I didn't mean that sort of look." Neville shook his head. "It's the same sort of look she gives you - as if you're a sort of marvellous surprise that she can't quite take in all at once, so she has to keep looking." He paused and grinned suddenly. "And you find Hermione attractive, then? How long has that been going on?"

Snape resisted the urge to say "Since I saw her nearly naked." Amusing as it might be to toy with Longbottom's hormones, it would be dishonourable to betray Hermione's embarrassing little secret, especially as she had only been trying to protect him. "Since she ceased to be my pupil, I suppose, and I was free to see her as a - as a young woman rather than an old child." And he was marvellously surprized that she - that any of them - would give up so much time and energy just to care for him; but he wasn't about to admit to such a sentimental emotion in front of another male, in the cold sober light of day.

Neville nodded. "Well, I think she really likes you - and you like her, too, or you'd never put up with her fussing over you like a hen with one chick." He smiled, giving Snape's shoulder a little pat. "And you're lucky, she's really picky. I think she's only dated about twice all the time we've been at school."

"You're the only mother hen here" Snape said irritably, twitching away from the pat. "I'm amazed you don't actually cluck." He had to admit, though (even if only to himself) that if Hermione - if Granger had patted him he probably wouldn't have shied away. And it was true that her past romantic history, insofar as he was aware of it, did suggest a predilection for sullen, gangling youths with big noses.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Snape looked at the girl sideways and cleared his throat; a mild, tentative noise, like an anxious sheep. "Um, Granger - I wanted to ask you - "

She looked up from her essay, her frown of concentration loosening as he watched, and for a moment he couldn't think how to continue. He was accustomed to people's frowns getting deeper when they looked at him, not relaxing into this open pleasantness. "Sir?"

"Ah, well..." There was nothing for it: he'd started, now, and saying "Oh, nothing" would make him look like a fool. "Ah, Longbottom seems to think... ridiculous, I know, but he seems to think you might be... interested in me? I mean... I know you did say - what you said - about needing, ah, ten minutes of privacy but I assumed you just meant that I was... well, male, and in bed with you. I didn't think that it was... personal?"

Hermione blinked. "Why does Neville think that?" she asked, trying to sound casual. But a terrible, betraying blush rose in her cheeks, making her face feel hot, and she couldn't look him in the eye at all. Neville was going to regret opening his big, observant mouth if it was the very last thing she did before walling herself up in her bedroom so she could die of embarrassment in peace!

"He, um, seemed to think that you, ah - 'couldn't take your eyes off me' was one of the phrases he used, and he insisted that it wasn't just horrified fascination. 'Hen with one chick' was another."

"I... er..." The blush intensified. "Well, I do... uhm... worry about you, of course." She still couldn't look him in the face, and found herself fiddling nervously with the edge of the sheet. "And we're friends, of course, and... er..."

He blinked for a moment at that. He counted several of his colleagues as friends, of a sort, so why did having a student think of him as a friend feel so damned odd - both sweet and bitter? Perhaps because, when he was a student himself, he would have sold his soul to have somebody call him friend in that natural way, as if it was a statement of fact and not just a ploy to get something out of him - especially after Lils had thrown him over. "I'm not sure whether to be flattered or offended," he said lightly, "since it puts me in the same category as Potter and Weasley, the Gryffindor Brains Truss." Come to think of it, he had sold his soul to have friends, or at least allies. Unconsciously, his hand moved through empty space, trying to rub at the mark which was no longer there - the one good thing which could be said for losing his limbs. "So, I presume I can tell Longbottom that you only watch me because you're afraid that if you take your eyes off me for an instant I'll do something stupid - like your other male friends?"

"Oh, no... I mean, I don't worry about that. You're nothing like Harry and Ron." Hermione managed to look at him properly, still blushing very hard. He looked vaguely puzzled by the whole thing, and it was weirdly adorable. "And... er..." Before she could stop herself, the betraying words popped out. "Would it be, uhm, bad if Neville was... not completely wrong?"

Snape eyed her cautiously, feeling slightly stunned. "Merlin's teeth," he said quietly, "do you mean to tell me that you really do...?"

"Well, I didn't mean to tell you," she mumbled, looking down at her hands. "And Neville's in big trouble for telling you. But... uh... yes, I really do."

"Good God." After all that his captors had done to him last summer, if he had thought about it in advance he would have found the idea of somebody taking a sexual interest in him again terrifying; but the girl was being so obviously diffident and unsure that it was hard to feel seriously threatened. And yet - how could it possibly be true? "Is this a joke, Granger? Because if it is..."

_If it is,_ his treacherous mind reminded him, _that means that Longbottom is in on it_ - and he found himself curiously reluctant to believe that the boy would be so cruel. "I mean - just look at me. You've never actually struck me as insane."

"It's not a joke!" she said hastily. "I mean, it'd be a particularly dreadful one even if you were well. And I have looked at you and... well..." She fiddled with the edge of the sheet again, twisting it around her fingertips. "I didn't _decide_ to feel this way, it just sort of... happened. And the more time I spend with you, the more it keeps on happening."

"You must have unusual tastes," he said lightly. "Generally speaking, the longer people know me, the less attractive they find me." He sighed and looked at her, frowning. "Look at me, Granger. Now - what did you think would or could be the outcome of this - eccentric fancy? I can assure you I am not in the habit of - indulging in dalliances with students."

Hermione took a deep breath, and looked down at her hands again. "I don't want..." Her voice cracked embarrassingly, and she gulped and tried again. "I don't want you to think that I... that I expect anything from you," she said falteringly. "I don't. I know you don't... I mean, I always knew you wouldn't ever... er... feel about me the way I feel about you. I'm a student, and a kid, a-and an insufferable know-it-all, and I just... I didn't want you to feel as if I expect anything because I've been looking after you, and all, because I'd have done that anyway, it's just that I happen to... to care about you, a lot, and I didn't ever intend to tell you because... well, after everything you've been through, the last thing you need is an over-emotional teenager throwing herself at you."

She swallowed hard, knowing her face was unbecomingly crimson, her eyes probably almost as red from trying not to cry, and... well, all in all, not exactly a sight to stir a man's blood. She sniffed. "And we don't ever need to mention it again, if you don't want to, that's perfectly all right."

He reached out tentatively and brushed a tear from her cheek. "Don't cry, Granger, there's a good girl."

"You're not - angry with me?"

"Oh, no, I... And I know all about hopeless teenage passion for an unobtainable object, believe me - but I never expected to _be_ the object. I'll need to - think about that. A lot."

"You're not an object. You're an unobtainable person. And I don't see why not... loads of students have had crushes on you. You should read some of the graffiti in the fourth-floor girls' toilets." She gave him a lopsided, unhappy smile. "Although I don't think it is a crush, for me. I've had those, and this feels rather different."

"But - how? Why? I have never been anybody's idea of attractive, even before I was - maimed. Are you certain these - graffiti artistes aren't just having a joke at my expense? That would be the norm for teenage girls, in my experience. I mean - I don't mean that you... At least, you don't give me that impression."

Hermione grinned suddenly. He was being so human, and his bewilderment was almost... cute. "Well, there's the obvious," she pointed out. "Aside from the odd temporary DADA teacher, you're the only male under sixty-five on the grounds who isn't a student. You may not ever earn '_Witch Weekly_'s Most Charming Smile', but given that you're competing with Hagrid and Professor Flitwick..." She shuddered. "And then, of course, there's your voice. You may not be aware of it, but you have a very sexy voice." She blushed a bit at that, but he obviously needed to know. "And the... well... aura of danger. You swoop around in those black robes, you purr menacingly, you smite egotistical DADA teachers with a single flip of your wand... a lot of girls are attracted to dangerous smouldering, you know." She paused. There was more, of course, but he was looking at her as if she'd lost her mind already.

"And there I thought I was keeping people at arms' length by, um, 'smouldering' - not attracting them. But the comparison is scarcely flattering - even I will admit to probably being a more appealing sexual prospect than Hagrid. To women less than eight feet tall, anyway."

She giggled suddenly, at the sheer silliness of that particular image. "This is very true. But it's true, and I wouldn't... belittle how important this is by lying to you. You are, in and of yourself, very attractive, but lack of choice is a factor too." She blushed, but forged ahead. "Aside from appearances... uh... well, any girl who's dealt with the amateur fumblings of adolescent boys, and then, say, watched you peel a shrivelfig... There's a lot of appeal in the idea of someone with that kind of absolute precision of touch."

Snape turned suddenly and exceedingly pink. "It would never do" he said studiously to the corner of the ceiling, "to be clumsy in matters which require... delicate handling. As it were."

"Definitely." Hermione winced a bit. "Careless grabbing has caused many a teenaged boy to be murdered in his girlfriend's thoughts, believe me."

"I suspect I am nothing like as, um, experienced as you seem to assume, but I think I can safely say I've never caused a girl actually to contemplate murder. Not for _that_, anyway."

She blushed. "I... well, I didn't think you were hugely experienced, or anything, given how long it's just taken me to convince you that you're really quite fanciable," she pointed out. "But I can't imagine you ever being... inconsiderate, or too rough with the more delicate bits. And I'm sure you at least did the reading first." She couldn't help grinning at that. "I mean, nobody expects a brilliant first attempt, but if someone's not even going to consult a picture or a diagram indicating where you find what beforehand, they're just not even trying."

"And I'm sure you could draw us a full diagram complete with numbered parts, Granger" he said waspishly. "It wasn't easy to consult a book on anything - like that, with Sirius Black and James Bloody Potter and their parasites stalking me every moment of every bloody day. I got enough snide comments about my reading habits as it was. Though I did, um, sometimes have access to a Muggle public library during the holidays..."

Hermione blushed furiously. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply that... uhm... I mean, I just..." She trailed off, biting her lip. Very clever, Hermione. Try to refer to your shared obsessive reading habit and wind up insulting him. "It was a joke, mostly. Uhm. You've always commented on my tendency to rely on the textbook."

He snorted delicately. "A textbook is generally a good starting-point, Granger, but there are certain areas where there is really no substitute for... hands-on experience."

She blinked uncertainly, unsure how to respond. She ran hastily through the possibilities. He snarled when people cowered, snapped defensively when they were rude or dismissive... but he seemed to like honesty. Right. She could do honesty. "And when an opportunity to acquire hands-on experience presents itself, I'll certainly consider it," she said, quirking an eyebrow at him. "Until then, a knowledge of the theory is better than no knowledge at all... I mean, at least the rather peculiar-looking male anatomy isn't going to come as a shock. And when the opportunity to practise does... ah... arise, I assure you, I have every intention of excelling as much in that respect as I tried to in class." She paused, and then snickered quietly. "Although I don't think that whoever I'm practising on would take kindly to me stopping in the middle to make notes. Maybe a Dictaquill..."

Snape stared at her in some alarm. "Good grief. One of the things you're going to learn when you progress to the, um, practical instead of the theory is that men - as opposed to teenage boys - are quite easily unnerved. Under certain circumstances. It might be less - unnerving, under those particular circumstances, if you just stuck to using a Pensieve afterwards. I'm sure Albus would lend you his. If you explained what you wanted it for."

Hermione blushed and giggled at THAT thought. "Oh, I wouldn't have to," she said cheerfully. "I'm such a bookworm that teachers never suspect me of doing anything underhanded. Really, you're the only one who didn't blithely hand me anything I requested for 'a project' without a second thought." She started ticking things off on her fingers. "I got hold of _Most Potente Potions_ in my second year... learned how to work a Protean Charm by the fifth despite it being restricted... Hagrid, bless him, will hand over a handful of unicorn hair or any other creature-based goodies without a second thought... Honestly, if he'd had boomslang skin and bicorn horn, back in second year, I wouldn't have had to steal yours."

"Good God - I always thought that that was Potter... although I did think at the time that it was a more efficient bit of business than his usual blatant idiocies."

"No, Harry just did the diversion - he disrupted the class, I ducked in and out of your store-room, and you never even noticed that I'd gone." Hermione smiled wryly. "Did I ever thank you for helping Madam Pomfrey change me back from being a cat-girl? Because I was terrified that I'd be stuck that way for ever, and I'd honestly never been so glad to see you, at that point, as I was when you showed up in the infirmary with those potions."

"It was an impressive effect, but I have to say I prefer you with your own face. Not that I'm in a position to criticize anyone else's appearance at the moment - or ever, if it comes to that."

Hermione smiled ruefully. "I prefer my own face as well, believe me... and when it comes to carelessness-induced hilarious spell-damage, you may criticize as much as you like - one's own face is one thing, a furry whiskery one with a pink nose is something else altogether. You, I'm sure, would have made sure the hair you nicked off Millicent Bulstrode's robes was hers, and not her cat's. Even if she did have you in a headlock at the time."

He shuddered delicately. "I don't even want to think about the words 'Millicent Bulstrode' and 'headlock' in the same sentence. You're lucky you still have both ears."

"You're the one who paired us up, in that wretched duelling club exercise," Hermione pointed out, and then she smirked. "She only grabbed me because I knocked her wand out of her hand. She may be big, but I could flatten her in a magical duel... and then, as you say, get my ears handed to me." She paused. "And, you know, you were awfully dashing that day... flattening Lockhart and all, with just a wand-flick and a sneer. I was very impressed." He was never, EVER going to find out she'd had a crush on Lockhart at the time. She'd been thirteen. Anyone could make an error of judgement at that age. And she HAD been impressed.

"And there I was thinking you would have been rooting for the other side in that little encounter" he said lightly. "Considering your... predilection for dear Gilded-Boy."

Hermione blushed scarlet. "I was thirteen! Nobody has good judgement when they're thirteen! And, OK, I WAS worried that you'd hurt him, but that didn't mean you didn't impress me as well. And I'd ask you how you know, but I think even Ron noticed. And Ron's about as perceptive as a Flobberworm, most of the time... when it comes to girls, anyway."

"Oh, I think eight out of every ten Flobberworms would have more sense than to prefer Lavender Brown over the Brain of Gryffindor..."

"How did you...?"

"Longbottom - I get all the gossip." He smiled at her obliquely. "When I was thirteen I had a crush on the Quidditch mistress. She had thighs that could crack a Brazil nut and she made Hooch look girly, but I thought she was wonderful."

She smiled back, rather wistfully. "I... is it strange that I find that rather encouraging? I mean, I can't crack a Brazil nut, but if you fancied tough, bossy women at thirteen, there's at least a chance you will now. And... it did hurt at the time, that Ron just... went for Lavender so easily, but it's sort of a relief now. He moved on from her so easily too that when things weren't working out for us, I knew the signs and could call things off without worrying about hurting him - or having him do something very stupid in an attempt to make me ditch him, because he doesn't have the nerve to do it himself. And thank heavens I did, because he and I had been dancing around this... thing we had for so long, and I have no idea how I would have told him that somehow you had eclipsed him as utterly as the sun blots out the stars..."

She blushed at the odd expression on his face. "Well, I wouldn't have put it like that," she mumbled; "it would have hurt his feelings. But it's true. And... thank you, for saying that any sensible Flobberworm would have preferred me."

"Anybody with any taste would, I think - although perhaps not someone who thinks that a maroon jumper goes with red hair. But your taste is - surprizing. Flattering, but surprizing. Are a smooth voice that's been ruined by screaming my bloody guts out now anyway and a sinister manner I can hardly bloody practise lying down really enough to make up for this - grotesque - I was ugly to begin with, but _now_..."

"I like your face" she said seriously. "I always have, and a few scars aren't going to change that. It has strength and character and it's amazingly expressive, when you let it be. And let's face it, if I wanted boyish good looks, it's not like Harry's quick enough on the uptake around girls to get away. Or Ron, either, if I'd really tried. I like YOUR face. It never gets that 'duuuh, what did she just say' expression when I use long words."

"Which would, I can see, be a serious problem where Wonder-Boy and the Ginger Gorilla are concerned."

Hermione snickered. A tiny bit disloyal, perhaps, but she was glad he was at least up to continuing his tradition of insulting Harry and Ron. "Oh, God, yes. Did you know, despite everything we've gone through, they still haven't read _Hogwarts: A History_? They just make a wild supposition then wait for me to dredge up the appropriate information for them. Which is actually very much their approach to research in general." She shook her head, smiling down at him. "You have no... actually, you probably do have a fairly good idea how good it is to find someone you can just talk to, without having to edit out the long words and difficult ideas. And..." She shrugged and smiled a little. "You know how I hit on the idea of calming you down after a nightmare by discussing Arithmancy? That's what _I_ do. I read the textbook if I wake up after a bad dream, it helps me get back to sleep. It's so... definite. So real. Facts are comforting. And having something like that in common matters a lot more than what either of us looks like."

"A meeting of minds?" he said rather bitterly. "There've been so few people in my life who cared to talk to me at all that I could hardly afford to be choosy. But yes, it's - refreshing, I think, to have someone to talk to who isn't playing mind-games all the time, and with whom I don't have to keep on translating my thought-processes into some sort of watered-down layman's version." He smiled one of his tight, there-and-gone smiles. "The really astonishing thing was finding out how - academically-minded, and even gifted, Longbottom is, under all that fluff and twittering. I always knew that you were brilliant, if you'd only get your nose out of a book and think for yourself occasionally - but I never expected to find Longbottom so intellectually bracing."

"I never had time to think for myself. I had Harry and Ron to think for." Hermione grinned ruefully. "And Neville surprised me too... he's quite bright when he's not all nervous, and he actually seems almost embarrassed about it, sometimes. It's not what is expected of him, after all, and Neville tries so hard to live down to other people's expectations."

"Oh. I - never thought of it like that. I thought if I pushed him, told him he was useless at Potions, he'd get better at it in order to prove me wrong. It's what I'd do! It never occurred to me that he might think it was his duty to prove me right."

"Neville is very sweet-natured, and very used to doing what he's told... his grandmother is a terrifying old lady, you know. She makes you look positively cuddly and approachable. And Neville always does his best to do what he's told and not fail people's expectations of him, because he's what my mum calls a Good Boy... so yes, you telling him he was dreadful might well have made him worse. Of course, he's dreadfully accident-prone all by himself, that part had nothing to do with you. Some wizards are, Madam Pomfrey says. If their magic itself is disordered or misaligned in some way, physically, emotionally or on the basic power level, they'll just attract small misfortunes as a matter of course. Like poor Tonks... Metamorphmagi are internally disorganized by definition - it's what gives them the ability to change themselves - but it does have a down-side." She paused and grinned suddenly. "And I would have lost Harry and Ron at 'misaligned'. I do like talking to you."

"Hah! - thanks. So why, in your opinion, is Longbottom misaligned - and what can be done to straighten him out?"

"I think it's already happening... he's losing some of that self-doubt and feeling less like he's a disappointment and a failure. You're helping, with that... talking to him, and letting him help, instead of chasing him away or refusing to tell him anything. A lot of people do that."

"I'm not being unselfish by 'letting him help,' believe me. He's amazingly... I hate saying that he is 'good with me' - it makes me sound like a dog that bites although I suppose some people would say that that was appropriate - but he is very good at talking me through the worst of the nightmares and calming me without making me feel weak and stupid for needing to be calmed."

"I suspect it's because he knows so well himself, how it is to be made to feel weak and stupid and vulnerable, that he knows how not to do it to other people. He's so... humble about it, as if he expects to be treated that way, and it always startles him when someone stands up for him... but he would never, EVER do it to someone else." She gave him a small, almost hopeful smile. "And speaking of Neville, I've already taken up about half an hour of his turn. So... I suppose I should go, and let you... think about everything."

"'Everything' including Longbottom, it seems - but if I start being _nice_ to him, he's going to think I'm sickening for something."

* * *

**PLEASE NOTE:** _Lost and Found_ is currently up for an award in the Tears (Best Darkfic) and Courage (Best Extreme Fic) categories of Round Six of **The Multifaceted Fanfiction Awards**. 

**Dyce**'s solo story _Survivors_ is also in the Rapture (Best Het Fic rated G to PG-13) section, and **whitehound**'s solo story _Mood Music_ is in the Identity (Best Original Character) category.

If you liked any of them enough to vote for them, please go to **The Multifaceted Fanfiction Awards** at multifaceted. creative-musings. com (no 'w's) and cast your vote before 22nd July.

* * *

**Author's note:**

Luna is of course quoting from _The Last Unicorn_ by Peter S. Beagle again.

Ice-egg runes are a variant of the standard Norse or Futhark runes. Futhark runes are so called because F, U, Th, A, R, K are the first six letters of the Norse runic alphabet - in the same way that the word "alphabet" itself is derived from "Alpha, Beta", the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Futhark runes are constructed entirely from straight lines which could easily be cut into wood or stone.

In the case of ice-egg runes, you take a hexagon and draw three lines across it, each running from one corner to its opposite and passing through the centre, until you have a hexagonal grid which is divided into six touching triangles. This grid is called an ice-egg, possibly because it resembles a snowflake. Then you distort the proportions of the standard Futhark runes in such a way that all the lines of which they are made up, vertical, horizontal and slanting, can now be mapped onto one of the lines of the ice-egg. The effect is rather like the simplified, geometric-looking font you get on the sort of calculator or digital clock screen which turns all letters and numbers into an arrangement of short horizontal and vertical lines.

For those of you who were concerned about the long wait between updates, don't worry; unless both of us get run over by a bus, this story _will_ be finished, and will probably run to about twenty chapters. It's just that **Dyce** is writing it simultaneously with another fannish novel, and **whitehound** is writing it turn-and-turn about with another fannish novel and a straight SF novel, so it has to wait in line.

This chapter has been slightly edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to show that Snape did have some friends at school, although mostly they were exploiting him.


	13. 11 As Others See Us

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**11: AS OTHERS SEE US**

"Frankly, I don't see why I have to be consciously 'ethnic' just because the Race Relations industry tells me I should, leik. OK, my grandparents were from southern Sudan, and I hate the thought that cousins of mine are being persecuted, and I'm quite interested in the culture, in a vague sort of a way - but I'm from Newcastle. And isn't it rather racist of _them_, to insist that my genetic background is necessarily more important than where I grew up? After all, the Celts came from Turkey originally, and they don't feel obliged to... OK. Bad analogy. Saturday night on Sauchiehall Street and it's wall-to-wall kebabs..."

"I don't care if it is a traditional Glaswegian delicacy - I categorically refuse to eat a deep-fried Mars Bar."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"You've got a piece wrong there" the older man said, reaching out his sugar-sticky fingers, and Snape slapped them away irritably.

"Yes all right, Horace, I can see it." He clicked the offending piece out of position and glowered at it as if it had personally insulted him.

"It's good to see you ah, amusing yourself - relaxing a bit."

"I don't know if I'm relaxing or driving myself insane - jigsaws! Does that sound to you like the sort of thing I do? But I get so restless, sometimes, I need something to - " To stop me from thinking, he thought, to keep me anchored in the present where I can fool myself into feeling like a whole person instead of a broken, crawling - but he was damned if he was going to say to Horace what he would hesitate to confide in Albus. "And even I can't read _all_ the time."

"Yes, well, that was why - that is, I was wondering... I'm not a young man any more, you understand, and they do so look to you, so I was wondering whether you might consider... resuming some of the, ah, pastoral aspects of being Head of House."

"I should have known if you came to see me it was because you wanted something from me."

"We are both Slytherins," Slughorn replied calmly. "But it isn't - only that. They respect you, Severus, far more than they do me - I would go so far as to say that they love you, at least in some cases. They would be far more pleased to have advice from you, and would be far more likely to respect it, and - well. It would please me to see you - recovering."

"Oh, of course it would - the sooner I get back in harness, the sooner you can get out of it."

"Not - just that, Severus. You were always one of my all-time favourites, you know that you were, and you know that I - well, that I usually choose my favourites because they have money, influence, connections, and you had none of those things, but you had a shining talent I have rarely seen before or since, and I nurtured that talent because it was something marvellous, not for what I could get out of it. Not primarily, anyway. To see my shining star, my - foray into altruism so - so damaged, it grieves me, it truly does. I wish I had been able to protect you."

"It's not your fault, Horace," Snape muttered, pushing the swivelling table off to the side and sinking back against the pillows. "No one could protect me. No one can protect me."

"Don't say that! Albus is doing everything - "

"Albus may do everything in his power, and still if the - if Riddle wins, you know what will happen to me. Torture, starvation, r-rape, that's just the start: after my - my defiance in surviving him, Riddle will make what they did to me last year look like a stroll in the park."

"Don't!"

"Don't - pretend. He will have me pleading for death for decades, you know that he will. You know that it looks more and more as if it was students, our own students, Horace, who smuggled me into that damned store-room but we don't know who - I'm not safe, I'm not safe even here and sooner or later he _will_ come for me, unless we can defeat him once and for all. Or unless you..." He held the other man's pale green gaze for a moment and then looked aside.

"Unless I - what, Severus?" said the fat man, wringing his hands. "I'll do anything - anything."

"You were my Head of House, Horace, you had responsibility for me, as I have for my Slytherins - and yes, I'll see them if you think they really need me, the older ones that know me best, at any rate. But promise me - if it starts looking like we're going to lose this war, promise me as my Head of House that you will kill me before they can take me again. Promise me."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"The longer - the longer this goes on, that I am not... recovered, the more guilty I feel for taking up so much of your time, Lovegood - yours and everybody else's."

"That's all right sir, I don't mind. It's nice to have a proper friend."

Snape blinked at her, turning that one over in his mind. Hermione was one thing, but Lovegood and Longbottom - he was a patient, a burden, a thing that they were _doing_, they were - they had been - his students and now they were his - what? His minders, his carers, passed from one unequal relationship to another. The idea that they might actively enjoy his company, that they might find these sessions with him a pleasure rather than a nuisance, was utterly foreign - and yet in a bizarre way, when he wasn't too tired or depressed or frantic to appreciate it, he realized that he found their company quite... congenial. Certainly nothing like as annoying as he would have expected it to be. And if that was the case, maybe it was the same for them. Maybe (whisper it) he wasn't as annoying as they would have expected, either.

And Lovegood was such an oddity - at least as isolated as he had been at her age, and would have been as persecuted if she had ever given her would-be tormentors the pleasure of seeing her react to them particularly; but instead she sailed serenely on, a pale flame burning over the water, and her perfect self-containment impressed him as much as it baffled him.

He frowned up at her thoughtfully, his long brows bowing like black wings. "Yes. Yes, it is."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I don't know what you said to persuade him, dear boy, but Horace turned up at my office this morning in quite a state, and handed me the memory I'd been trying to get out of him for over a year."

"Oh, I was very - Slytherin. You would have been proud of me - or perhaps not."

"I am proud of you. Always."

"Then why do you allow him to undermine my authority? I _told_ you that Potter does not belong in a NEWT-level Potions class. Bad enough that you let the little brute stretch the rules yet again and study with a private tutor in Hogsmeade - I suppose it's his own business if he wants to waste his father's money that way, and he might even scrape a pass, but thinking that his skills are sufficient to make him an Auror... they'll let him in if he even barely passes, you know they will, because of who he is and he isn't up to it. The stupid brat's going to get himself killed, first time out."

"I understand your concerns, Severus, I really do - but so far, Harry has shown a remarkable facility for not being killed. It is, you may say, his best subject."

"Huh. There's a first time for everything - and in this case, the first time will be the _last_ time. And even aside from that, he cannot be anything in a NEWT-level class except a, a dead weight dragging the others back, and yet Horace has allowed him in to disrupt the progress of my other students - students who deserve better! Bad enough that thanks to my - my imbecility in allowing myself to be caught, they've had three changes of teacher in their final year, without having to cope with Potter's explosive bloody _accidents_ as well."

"I gather that Mr Potter's potions have become mysteriously less volatile in the regrettable absence of young Mr Malfoy... in fact Horace tells me he is a remarkably able student."

"I'll believe _that_ when I see it."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Get that - _bloody_ toad out of the bed before it - aah!"

"What? What is it?"

"It's bloody-well on me, it's in my nightshirt, get it off me - !"

"If you'd hold still for a moment I could! Don't be such a baby!"

By a supreme effort of will, Snape managed to stop wriggling long enough for Neville to plunge his hand down the neck of his shirt and come out with a struggling Trevor, then collapsed back against the pillows, panting slightly. "Oh God - how can something so slimy be so tickly at the same time? And - ugh, I think it peed on me..."

"Well, he wouldn't have if you hadn't thrashed about so," Neville said indignantly. "You scared him." They stared at each other for a moment, boy, man and toad, and then Snape began to laugh, weakly, and after a moment Neville joined in, and in another moment they were both laughing until their eyes watered, while Trevor blinked at them solemnly.

When he had got his breath back, Snape looked at the boy and sighed. Now or never.

"You don't know what it costs me to say this, Longbottom, but I'm sorry I was such a bastard to you." Neville looked up, startled, and opened his mouth to say something, but Snape ploughed determinedly on. "I - I know I was never exactly pleasant in any case - I never intended to be! - but I didn't think I was - such a monster as to be anyone's Boggart. Not - not a student, anyway." There were things he'd had to do to maintain his cover as a spy... but then he'd been behind a mask, and faceless.

"That's all right, sir."

"No it bloody isn't! Why was I - why was my nagging you so terrible? You must have known I'd never actually hurt you. You must have led a - a very bloody pampered, pure-blood life if me telling you you were a, an accident waiting to happen was the worst thing that'd ever happened to you!"

"But I didn't know you wouldn't hurt me, did I? When I was bad at magic my Uncle Algie used to try to drown me, or drop me off high buildings, to see if he could force more magic out of me. I thought you were going to - to poison me or something for being so useless."

"Good God. And your grandmother _allowed_ this?"

"Oh yes. If we're being frank, sir, my Gran is a - a bullying, evil-tempered old bat. And you were so - you never let up, especially in third year."

"If we're being frank, as you put it, Longbottom, then I - I'll let you in on a secret. I suppose I owe you that. When I was... a couple of years younger than you are, Sirius Black set me up to be - to be eaten by Remus Lupin, when he was in his were form. The only reason I survived was because James Potter got cold feet about it and got me out at the last moment but I actually _saw_ Lupin coming at me, neither man nor beast..."

"I - I did hear that Harry's father saved your life."

"Saved his own skin, more like it - he'd have been expelled for his part in it, Black would have gone to Azkaban and Lupin - Lupin would have been put down like a mad dog, although he insists he didn't know what Black was planning. But that isn't the point. The point is, Lupin is my Boggart, and having him actually there, in the flesh, all bloody year was..."

"Oh! That must have been - nasty. At least I only had to see you close up twice a week, not - not every meal and tea-break."

"I was climbing the walls - and looking for somebody to take it out on, because I always bloody do. And you can't Riddikulus away a thing that's actually there, and there'd be no point imagining him in grandmother's clothing... it would just turn him into the wolf from Red Riding Hood, which would be even worse."

"I'm sorry - sorry about that. I, I wouldn't have dressed the Boggart in my gran's clothes if Professor Lupin hadn't suggested it. I'm not sure what I would have done with it, but not _that_."

"No, of course not. Lupin used you, to mock me again the way he always bloody did, it was all - always the same, always being held up to ridicule by the bloody Marauders. They poisoned my bloody life, even before Pettigrew - did what he did."

"Sir..."

"Yes, Longbottom?"

"Would you really have poisoned Trevor?"

"I'm starting to wish I had. But - yes, I would have. But not - not fatally, you understand. There wasn't anything in that potion which should have been lethal. But seeing the thing turn puce and pass out might have taught you children that potions aren't a - a _joke_, that making careless mistakes is _dangerous_ - and it might have taught you not to bring a pet into bloody class with you, especially one that's always bloody hopping off. I mean, honestly, Longbottom, what were you thinking? You were lucky he didn't end up in somebody's cauldron - or their fire!"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I found out why Longbottom is so nervous all the time - poor little brute. Apparently his family used to amuse themselves by putting him in life-threatening situations to see if they could squeeze any more magic out of him that way."

"Oh - yes, that would make sense."

"What do you mean?"

"Apparently, exposing a child to severe long-term stress can in some cases result in permanent impairment of memory. I, ah, read about it somewhere..."

"Granger, are you actually _trying_ to make me feel more guilty than I already do, or is it just a happy coincidence?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"It's all right, Horowitz; I'll make sure your aunt knows you didn't take the sweets deliberately." He looked at the pale, sniffling boy and sighed. Without his steadying hand the Slytherins seemed to have become more disruptive and disrupted than ever this year, and there had been a rash of depression or stress-related incidents. This one had walked out of the shop with an un-paid-for pocketful of Honeydukes' finest; apparently because he had been so spaced on Dreamless Sleep that he had forgotten to pay, rather than because he was intrinsically dishonest.

There was still the question of how he had managed to get hold of full-strength Dreamless Sleep in the first place; but the little brute was far too good at brewing and too ingenious for his own safety. He'd be turning himself furry if he wasn't watched. "There is still the matter of the unauthorized potion. I'm going to assign you detention with Madam Pomfrey; you will assist her with potion-making for the hospital wing every Tuesday evening until the end of term, and she will explain to you exactly why recipes intended for adults are not always either suitable or safe for thirteen-year-olds."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I thought - well, the conversation we had last month, about _Equisetum_ and all, it was really interesting, you helped me to clarify my own thoughts, and I thought - thought I'd write it down, see, before they got all muddy again."

"Oh, but this is very good, Longbottom, very well argued - and if _I_ say it, you know that I mean it."

"It's very good of you to look over it, sir."

"Oh, not at all - it's an unusual pleasure to read a student essay which is actually intelligent and original, even if a little - hard to decipher in places. Is that jam on that diagram? In fact, if you wanted to present this to the _Bulletin of Botanical Magic_ I'd be happy to help you tidy it up and put in a good word for you. I really think this may be publishable."

Neville wriggled like a pleased puppy. "So you wouldn't mind if I wanted to talk to you about plants again and, and what research I want to do - I mean, even when it isn't, mm, therapeutic?"

"I'd be happy to, within reason." The really astonishing part was that he found that he meant it. "Indeed, I'm - " flattered, he nearly said, but that would be giving away too much authority, "pleasantly surprized that you would ask me, after our former - difficulties."

"There's no one else _to_ ask, not - not an adult who'd be able to give me adult advice. I mean, not just about plants but... life stuff." He looked at Snape quizzically, seeing the lines about his thin mouth tighten. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean you were a last resort, or anything, honestly, I really like talking to you now you've mostly stopped biting my head off, it's just - well, Professor Sprout is always so busy with her Hufflepuffs, and so sort of bustly, I don't like to interrupt her..."

"Whereas I'm a captive audience with plenty of time on my hands - on my _hand_. Don't bother to apologize; we both know it's true. You can't talk about your ideas to anyone in your own family?"

"Oh, no sir. Everyone in my family - well, they're always - some of them worry about my parents, all the time, trying to find ways to make them well, and some of them pretend that all of us - me, my parents - just don't exist any more, because it hurts them to think about my mum and dad. Either way, they don't - there isn't _time_ for me, really there isn't, I understand that, so I just sit in the corner and keep quiet. It's nice to have a - well, a grown-up or an, um, an older man - that I can actually talk to."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"You see, I _told_ you you needed to exercise," Adrian said dispassionately.

"And would you mind bloody-well telling me how I'm meant to exercise hip muscles which don't have any actual fucking leg to pull against?"

He had ended up on his arse again. It was too much. The prototype prosthesis for his right leg, from the knee down, was coming along fine, he was a little wobbly but it was starting to feel something like a leg and he had thigh-muscles to move it with. But with no thigh-bone to bear on, the cut ends of muscles around his left hip had withered completely and there was no strength in them at all. The instant he tried to put any weight on the prosthetic left leg, down he went.

"Massage would be a start," the surgeon replied, taking his hand and hauling him rather unceremoniously back up and onto the couch. "Or even just - thinking about moving those muscles, you know? Concentrating on feeling them, on trying to move them, that might at least make them twitch a bit, and even moving them that tiny bit would help, if you did it regularly."

"I try not to think about them much - it's too depressing, and it gives me phantom sensation which - well."

"I know," Filius said, running a diagnostic spell across the failed leg and examining the result, "it must be very annoying. But now it would be a good idea to let those phantom sensations surface and integrate them in with the new limbs."

"You don't bloody know. Neither of you. It's not just - not just feeling as if the limbs are still there. If I let myself notice them, I can still feel them being bloody-well sliced off me, joint by fucking joint."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Thank you. Your, ah, discretion is, as ever, appreciated."

"I didn't actually - uhm, _do_ anything. Except go away."

"That's the point, Granger, isn't it? Do you have any idea how much - harder I mean more _difficult_ you could make this for me, if you wanted to?"

"Well, yes, but I don't want to... I see what you mean. How do the others handle - uh, respond to it?" Hermione was blushing a bit... he made her do that a lot... but discussing it on a more clinical level at least helped get rid of the pleasant mental images of what he'd just been doing...

"So far, the matter hasn't - come up. As it were. It seems to be only your presence which, well... And before you ask - if you were going to - I don't know whether that means that it's only your ah, attractions which overcome the weakness of my otherwise still-incapable body, or whether it's only with you that I feel relaxed enough to allow a generic reflex to manifest itself. Either way - " He coughed, and flushed slightly. "Either way, I haven't yet had to ask Albus or Poppy to make a tactical retreat while I deal with an early-morning hard-on. Thank God."

Hermione shuddered. "That would be... I know it's not possible to actually drop dead of embarrassment, but if I ever had to say something like that to either of them...!" She shook her head, and smiled at him a bit shyly. "It's... sort of nice that I'm the only one," she confessed. "I mean, not that I want you to not be relaxed enough to have the generic reflex, or anything, but..."

"I ought to be more embarrassed, not less, having to admit to my - predicament to somebody I know is, um, at least potentially interested in me, but you're always so reassuringly... practical. Albus, Poppy, Minerva - they've known me since I was eleven, and admitting to such a thing - well. It would make me feel as if I'd been caught in Filch's cupboard with my pants down, or - I suppose after - after Lucius and co. had finished with me last year you wouldn't think I had any sense of bodily dignity left, but I've always had a thing about feeling - exposed, ever since James Potter and his bloody Marauders stripped me and hung me upside-down in front of half the bloody school." His dark secret - one of them, anyway - but there was no point in concealing it, since it was certain that Potter would have lost no time in regaling his sidekicks with the full, humiliating details of what he'd seen in the Pensieve. "And Lovegood and Longbottom are both so... so young. Whereas you seem... older. I mean, I know you are about a year older than them anyway, but even allowing for that."

He frowned at her, his brows drawing together. "Or perhaps you make me feel younger. Either way, the fact that you have... expressed interest in me makes me feel more on a level with you, and less like a dirty old man, than I would if I had to, ah - in front of Lovegood. Even if she would take it in her stride." He sighed and smiled wryly at her. "It's probably the fact that Lovegood feels almost like my daughter and Minerva like my mother which keeps it from happening when they are present, whereas you... and you can derive from that what you will."

"I derive some comfort from knowing you don't think of me as either a mother or a daughter," she said honestly. "And I should hope not as a sister, either. Between Harry and Neville, I'm quite well equipped for honorary brothers just now - and you know that's not how I see you." It was... odd... now that he knew. He seemed a little wary, sometimes, or puzzled, but he didn't shoo her away or forbid any of the little liberties she'd got into the habit of taking, like brushing his hair or cuddling up to him while they discussed Arithmantic theory.

"I'm not - sure how I see you," he said honestly. "But not as a sister. At least - I've never had a sister, but I really don't think... And I have thought about the fact that you - that you don't find me entirely repulsive, physically speaking."

"I don't find you repulsive at all," she said, meeting his eyes squarely. "I never have, and I'm certainly not going to start now." She reached out to touch his cheek tentatively, brushing the narrow scar with her fingertips. "I hate that you've been hurt so much, and that the scars go on hurting you, but they don't repel me. They make me want to... to fix it, somehow, to make you happy again so you don't mind them anymore, if I can't make them go away for you."

"You're labouring under a misapprehension, Granger, if you think you can make me happy 'again'," Snape said lightly. "In fact, I've always rather prided myself on never having been happy."

Hermione assumed her best know-it-all expression and bossiest tones. "Well, then, I'm just going to have to do something about that. I'm sure I can organize some happiness; I'll write up a list, draw a nice coloured chart, maybe get a few reference books..."

He snorted at her. "Little Miss Management - or do I mean 'Mismanagement'? You will find that happiness is even harder to organize and to pin down with, with books and pie-charts than sexual attraction is. And Merlin knows, that's elusive and unpredictable enough. I don't suppose for one moment that you would have chosen to be attracted to a, a sour, ill-favoured cripple twice your age if you'd been in the driving seat of your own emotions, any more than I - " He stopped, and became suddenly very interested in his own fingernails.

Hermione blinked. That had sounded... promising. "Well, that would depend on who he was," she said slowly. "If he were a complete stranger, then no, probably not. But I liked you before... all this... and while I probably wouldn't have chosen to feel the way I do about you if I'd had a choice, that's only because I'd never for one minute think that you'd feel the same way about me, and unrequited yearning is painful. It's certainly not out of character for me, caring about you; I don't think I've ever dated anyone who didn't sulk and growl and make nasty comments. If you weren't a bit sour and cranky I wouldn't know what on earth to do with you."

"I do not sulk" Snape replied, bridling slightly, "and I resent being compared to your other..." He stopped again, feeling that he was edging out over some sort of abyss, without even knowing how he had got there. "The implication is that you would - that I would seem like a, a rational choice to you, if only I were inclined to reciprocate."

"Well, of course." She gave him a shy smile. "You're brilliant and brave and intellectual and you're stubborn, so I wouldn't have to worry about pushing you about, and you have a horrible temper so I wouldn't have to feel bad that I do as well, and you're... uhm..." He was staring at her, and she blushed deeply, looking down at her hands. "You're really, uh, very much my type."

Snape looked away from her. "I ought to feel insulted," he muttered, "since that brackets me with Ronald Weasley, the Red Moron. But I have thought about what it would be like if I were able to - to respond in kind." Out of the corner of his eye he saw the blasted girl stiffen and look up at him, suddenly as alert as a terrier at a rabbit-hole. As she opened her mouth to speak he looked back at her and made a dry face.

"I can't even claim to be experienced enough to _have_ a type, except - except 'nothing like Bellatrix'." His eyes darkened as he flinched abruptly from the jagged upsurge of memory, then shoved it firmly down into the depths again. "My _type_ as you call it would certainly include 'not a student' and 'significantly less than twenty years younger than myself', and trust me when I say that 'significantly less' does not mean 'four months less'... but now that you are not, strictly speaking, a student, or at least not _my_ student, the age-gap doesn't seem as insurmountable as it perhaps should."

"You'd never be in the same bracket as Ron. You're completely different," Hermione said positively. "It'd be like comparing a... a picture book and a grimoire. They both have words and pictures, and I like reading, but that doesn't mean I like them equally." She drew a deep breath. "Is my age really all that important?"

"It is and it isn't. You're half my age, and I won't pretend that doesn't bother me, but you're not a child. You're officially eighteen, more than of age both as Muggle and witch - and given the time you spent using a Time-Turner, in terms of your actual maturity you must be closer to nineteen than eighteen."

"I've been risking my life on a semi-annual basis since I was twelve years old," Hermione replied thoughtfully. "I haven't _felt_ like a child since I was about fourteen. Going down into a dark hole to face a convicted mass-murderer because I knew Harry would go anyway and someone had to protect him because he's a heroic idiot... I was nearly pissing myself with terror, but I went anyway. And once you start being a grownup about things, you can't really go back."

"You've faced things no-one so young should have to face, but still you are very young, and you are still a little - naive in some ways. And that concerns me: I don't want to feel that I might be - taking advantage, nor do I relish the idea of waking up one morning to find myself grown out of. On the other hand, as a companion your intellect more than makes up for any - deficit in experience. And please believe me, that's _rare_ - and very refreshing."

"That's one of the things I like about you, too. I can talk to you without having to stop every couple of sentences to explain things." She pulled her knees up under her chin, giving his concerns the serious thought they merited. "And I can't imagine you ever being grown out of. If anything, I think you're someone I'd need to grow into... you can converse on my level, but I can't manage yours, yet. And as for taking advantage... given our current positions, I'd be more worried that I was taking advantage of YOU... I mean, I've been nursing you for months, you might feel... I don't know, obligated, or something."

"That's not - totally stupid. Not because... After everything that - if anybody approached me sexually, now, I don't know whether I'd shy away like a scared cat or submit like a bloody machine with no right to refuse. I can't make up my mind which would be more embarrassing - the robotic whore, or hiding under the bed and hissing. I _am_ sure that if it comes to it I'd rather be imposed on than impose on someone else, but it disturbs me to think of someone as fresh and, and _clean_ as you are going with somebody as shop-soiled as I feel myself to be."

She reached out to take his remaining hand, sliding hers under it instead of over, so he could lift it away if he chose. "I would... not be happy, precisely, because I've been daydreaming about being with you for a long time... but content, without that," she said slowly, choosing her words carefully. This was terribly important, and she would rather bite off her own tongue than hurt him - especially over this. "If you didn't want to, if you kept on feeling that way about it... I'd be thrilled if we did, of course, no matter how slowly and carefully we had to take things, but I can certainly live without it. If I could just... be with you, every day, love you and be loved by you..." Her face felt all hot, but she carried on. "Then that would be enough. I'd rather that than ever risk hurting you."

"That's - very kind. I mean I'm - touched, truly. But I... I don't know if _I_ could live like that. You know I do still have - desires. That was where we came in, wasn't it? With my bloody reaction to waking up next to you? I don't know if I could stand _wanting_ and not _having_ - but I'd be afraid of having and then feeling so - dirty. Remembering that they made me into this - crawling, tainted thing. This - obedient puppet. Half a bloody puppet..." He scowled down at their joined hands for a moment and then glanced up at her out of the corner of his eye, curiosity and hope warring with shame and embarrassment. "Did you really mean that, Granger, that you would be... thrilled...?"

"I..." Hermione thought for a moment. "All right, in order... I'm glad, I admit, that you don't want to do it that way. I just... I wanted you to know, and believe, that I would never _expect_ you to... well. Anything, really. I don't ever want you to do anything you don't want to, just because you think _I_ do. And as for you being tainted..." She reached out to touch his cheek tentatively with her free hand, just the merest brush of fingers. "I don't see you that way. You're... It's hard to put into words. You're like... a sword, of the very finest steel. Broken, but still bright and shining and... and incorruptible. You can be damaged, but never tainted." She looked down at their hands, feeling very silly, as she always did when she tried to be poetic. "And as for the third part... yes, I would. Be thrilled, I mean. Very nervous about accidentally hurting you, and nervous in general because I never actually have, but quite ecstatically happy anyway."

"I wish I could see myself the way you see me - I wish I could _be_ the way you see me. But I am surely tainted by the things I have done, even if - even if not by the things which have been done to me. I wish I felt that I was - worthy, of what you're asking: but surely you could do so much better. Especially if you are... if it would be your first time."

"I couldn't possibly do any better," Hermione said firmly. "You are brave, brilliantly intelligent, noble to a fault, a gifted wizard, _and_ you don't make bewildered-puppy faces when I talk about anything interesting. I love the boys, I do, but try to discuss anything more difficult than Quidditch with them and their eyes glaze over. Besides, I don't want anyone else, I want you." She reached out to caress his cheek again, smoothing his untidy hair back before drawing her hand away, and he shifted slightly to follow her touch. Then something he'd said rang a little bell, and she brightened, unconsciously making the "aha, I know the answer" face he'd seen hundreds of times in class. "And you know, seeing yourself the way I see you is actually a really good idea... I mean, if you used Legilimency you _could_, couldn't you?"

"Truthfully? You would permit the, the 'great bat' to invade your mind, to see your innermost thoughts, and not push him away? Do you really trust me that much, you foolish girl - knowing what you know about me, and what you don't know about me? I never had you down as the reckless type."

"You're not a bat, and I've never called you that. And it wouldn't be an invasion, not if I suggested it, which I did, so there you are." She was getting flustered again, and she paused and took a deep breath. "Look, the only reason we're even having this conversation is because I'm utterly incapable of pushing you away even when I probably should, for your sake if not for mine. So I wouldn't now. And..." She gulped, going pink yet again. "And, well, love requires trust, and if I want it I should certainly offer it. So... yes. I'll permit it... actually, I'll request it. I don't know if I can explain it properly, and just showing you is better."

"Love?" he said oddly, and sank back against the cushions, staring at her under his brows. Without noticing he was doing it, he lifted his hand away from hers and bit reflexively at the knuckles, then after a moment he nodded tightly and then reached out and brushed her hair away from her forehead in his turn. "Very well." Still not taking his eyes off her, he fumbled rather awkwardly for the wand which lay on the bedside table and turned the tip towards her, his grip on the pale brown hawthorn (a hard wood, and very thorny) light and almost diffident. _"Legilimens."_

When he had seen the world through Harry's eyes like this, two years ago, he had shied away from looking at any image of himself - already withering in the force of the boy's bitter scorn a scorn which, since his breaking, had been replaced by guilt and pity, and he wasn't sure which Potter incarnation made him more uncomfortable - either way, the boy made him feel as though he had something sticky on the back of his neck. Now he wanted to shy away for a quite different reason. It had never occurred to him that his casual sarcasm towards the bossy Gryffindor brat would distress her any more than the same remarks in the mouths of her classmates, but he saw himself in her eyes now as a goal to be striven for, a rôle-model whose approval she craved and whose sneering dismissal cut her to the bone. Severus Snape, Uber-Geek - he had expected to be despised, as most of the students, he felt sure, despised him, but Granger, it seemed, aspired to _be_ him. Good God - what did she think he was?

Brilliant, his image in her mind whispered back: confident enough to display his intellect openly and not apologize for it; self-contained enough not to care who approved or disapproved of him; graceful and skilled; courageous, cunning, commanding. At the thought "cunning" he caught the tail-end flash of another memory - a beetle in a bottle - and started to grin, bitterly amused, remembering his graceful, self-contained, courageous self shaking and vomiting with terror before every summons and surely, if half of what he thought he had just picked up concerning a certain tabloid reporter was true, Granger was herself rather more the manipulative, cool-headed Slytherin - rather more the thing she thought she saw in him and sought to be - than he was himself. Perhaps, during this strange interlude where he was still part of the school and yet no longer her teacher, they could swap ends and he would appoint her as his rôle model. God knew he could do with one - especially now that he no longer knew who or what he was going to be.

He bit back the grin with an effort - he really, really didn't want the poor girl to think he was laughing at her. Poor, brave girl - he mentally slapped himself on the wrist for thinking it, but she _was_ being brave, letting him see her most embarrassing thoughts - daydreaming about him, good grief, though he was pleased to see that her fantasy version of himself was realistically abrupt and matter-of-fact. At least she wasn't expecting him to break out in mushy spots. And the attention that she had paid to him - he'd never realized, never noticed how she worried about him, watched over him, noticing the dark circles under his eyes, fretting about his tempers as being some sort of symptom instead of hating him for them, praying and praying every time he disappeared in the night that this time, _this_ time wasn't going to be the one that he never came back from...

The daydreams turned serious very suddenly and he shut his eyes and flinched away from her, almost losing the contact as his stomach tried to climb out of his throat in revulsion, seeing/feeling her sprint through the infirmary door with Potter at her side in a gabbling panic (Potter, panicking? about him?) and that was himself, himself, himself laid out on the bed like something long dead, horribly dead - not even a whole corpse but half of one, almost limbless, maggots spilling from a belly split like rotten fruit and stinking, skin barely covering the sharp bones, bruised black and eaten into by corrosion, blood on his thigh that he was shamefully, miserably aware of the reason for, smearing the sheets he lay on, blank, dilated eye unseeing in a face like a bearded skull, the mouth horribly slit back almost to the ears in a clown's nightmare grin, gaping open in silent, frozen agony...

...but when he wrenched himself back to face her again, forced himself to look straight at the wreckage of himself through the girl's eyes, instead of the disgust he expected - which he felt for himself - he saw/felt one great tearing jolt of horror and heart-wringing, desperate concern, as if something precious, beautiful, priceless was shattering into a thousand pieces in front of her and then she was - competent. Competent in a special way - Potter's voice babbling "There must be something - something we can do" and her voice saying steadily "There is" and she felt, he knew it, exactly the way one felt when the cauldron was one and one third of a second away from exploding but you knew _precisely_ which ingredient, out of the fourteen ingredients which you could reach within one second from where you were standing, would turn the contents into a simmering brew instead of a twenty-foot-deep crater. Exactly the way one felt when the Dark Lord was sniffing for answers and terror was towering overhead like a wall waiting to fall on you and crush you but you knew exactly the lie to tell, the sweet-spiteful words to say, to turn Him onto a new and less productive trail.

And if she felt like _that_, if she knew what it was to feel like that, maybe they could understand each other very well.

And she had never, not for one moment, felt disgusted by him. She could hardly look at the gut-wound and the maggots, even out of the corner of her eye, but she looked straight at his crippled body and his ruined face, ten times uglier even than nature had made him, had seen the blood leaking out of him and understood it and yet thought nothing except that somebody she liked (!) and admired (!) was injured and needed to be put right. Sorrow and anxiety and relief - relief that he had come back alive, in whatever condition. Vast, overwhelming relief that his ordeal was over and he was back safe among people who loved (!) him.

And later - combing the mats out of his hair and washing it for him, even in his mindless unresponsive state, and feeling the first stirrings of a vast and physical tenderness, wanting to touch him, afraid to do so in case it hurt him in one sense or another - holding him close while he shook and raved his way through some idiotic panic or other and not feeling scorn or even pity at his self-evident weakness but feeling split open to her soul by the emotional closeness of it... realizing that she enjoyed the closeness and wanted more of it, and being ashamed in case that meant she enjoyed his suffering, his vulnerability.

Realizing rather suddenly, a sudden hot epiphany, that she wanted to be closer to him in a very physical sense which made him blush to the roots of his hair, and then being ashamed of that - ashamed to want him in that way when she was so sure he would never want her, so that she saw her wanting as an offence, another imposition on someone who had already suffered so many impositions in that line - suffered what made him flinch and shudder even to half think about, even filtered through the lens of her shining gentle concern which somehow saw him as something fine that was torn and wanted mending, that was worth mending, rather than as something irreparably dirty.

Ashamed to tell him how she felt because she really thought that he would think she wasn't worthy of him - his brain was running out of exclamations - because she thought that he would _laugh_ at her, even now, even now that he was _this_, for daring to think that he might just possibly enjoy her company or find her physically appealing.

Well, you would have laughed, part of him said treacherously. Well - yes, but only because I would never have believed that she was _serious_ but she patently was, although what impressed him the most, he thought, was not her obvious care for him - amazing though that was in so many ways, still she was a person who cared, after all, and he still couldn't make his mind up whether she was in love with him personally or simply in love with being in love, for which almost anybody vaguely suitable would do - no, what amazed and impressed him the most, what made him want to say "A hundred points to Gryffindor" and really mean it, was that when she saw the extent of his injuries she had not gone on blindly trying to fix them with her own limited medical skills but had freely admitted her limitations and called in her half-sister's young man - as pleasant and competent a young man, he had to admit, as one could hope to meet anywhere; a young man in whom assurance had never soured into arrogance and whose effortless self-confidence - if he were to be as honest with himself as Granger was being with him - left him green with envy.

As the mental contact slipped out of his grasp, he blinked rather dazedly at his companion and asked the first thing which came into his head.

"_Really_ a cat-comb?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Yes, really a cat-comb," Hermione said, smiling a little at the startled note in his voice. "I've had a lot of practice, you see, with Crookshanks... I had the tools, and I know how to get mats out without hurting too much because if I do he bites me." Having him search her mind had felt... bizarre, and unnerving, but not entirely unpleasant. He had been so close, and she treasured the moment of intimacy even if it was an odd one, for there might never be another. She'd seen the images he'd called up, although she'd only got vague hints about his reaction to them. But he hadn't laughed, or flinched (except at the medical bits, which was understandable), so it wasn't as bad as it could have been, even if he hadn't exactly been encouraging.

And having him know made saying it easier. "I do love you, you see," she said quietly. "I wouldn't necessarily have chosen to - certainly not right now - because you certainly didn't think of ME that way, and you can be a real pain when you're in a mood, which you usually are, and right now really is a dreadful time for it, but... I just do. I've tried to make it go away, and I can't, and I've tried to reason myself out of it, and I can't, and... well. I don't expect you to reciprocate, I never did, and I wasn't ever going to tell you. But... if it came as that big a shock, then maybe it's a good thing I did. It's... reassuring... to know that someone cares about you that way, and that much, even if you don't feel the same way about them, because at least then you know it's _possible_ for someone to love you and want to be with you... Well, that's how it was for me, anyway, I know it might be different for you. But I'm still glad you know that it's possible."

And she should shut up now, because her eyes were stinging and starting to cry all over him wasn't going to help anything. She wanted so badly for him to care, to have even a hope that he'd love her as much as she loved him, someday, but Hermione was a realist at heart. He probably wouldn't... maybe even couldn't, at this point... and then she would just have to live with it. People didn't die of broken hearts, after all, although they might wish they could at the time. She would cope, and she certainly wouldn't cry on him or do anything else to make him feel even worse.

Snape frowned, and wished - among all the other things that he wished he still had - that he still had his proper, House Master's robes, with the extra handkerchiefs and the peppermints for comforting distraught students. "I suppose I should be grateful that it was you and not Hagrid wielding the cat-comb. But that's the problem. I mean..." His lips twitched upwards self-mockingly: Granger wasn't the only one who could get slightly tongue-tied about emotional matters. "Pot calling the kettle black" he said lightly. "I thought we'd already established - with a practical demonstration - that I find you... physically appealing, but you seem determined to doubt it. And although you seem determined to think yourself unworthy of me, I see so much of myself in you in some ways that being attracted to you feels a little - narcissistic."

He sighed and shut his eyes: it was easier to think that way. "What can I say to you? I'm not in love with you, I don't _know_ if I could come to feel as you feel - I was in love once, when I was younger than you are now, and I thought that I would never feel that way again, but I wouldn't rule it out so - resignedly. That's just self-defeating. I've certainly... I think highly of your intellect; your company is, for the most part, bracingly unsentimental which, believe me, is a relief at present; and far from being bad timing, if there was ever a time when I needed reassurance and a little - flattery, this is surely it. I feel perfectly safe with you; it's demonstrably true that I'm attracted to you physically; you don't make me feel any more ashamed than I already am about that or about any of my other - weaknesses. On the contrary, you make me feel like a real person with a future which might be almost bearable, and not just a, a crying, mindless thing lying on the floor waiting to be hurt. It seems to me now that I could, quite happily, lie down with you every night and wake up in your arms every morning, whether or not we actually..."

He glanced at her and then looked away, making a rueful face. "I'm immensely grateful to you - and that's the problem. I've never really felt grateful in my life before - I've never really had anything to be grateful for. Even my - my best friend when I was a child wanted me more for what I could teach her about magic than for myself, I think, and Albus only saved me from Azkaban for the use he could make of me. But now I have so many people to be grateful to, so much to be grateful _for_, and I can't tell whether what I feel for you is a true attraction with any sort of staying power, or just gratitude and - and wanting to reassert some measure of control over my own sexuality. This is not even to mention the fact that Longbottom seems to have decided, more or less unilaterally, that I am going to be his father-substitute, which means that if you and I were to... It would make you, in some sense, his stepmother - an idea which I find frankly disturbing."

Hermione laughed suddenly at that last, then smiled and shook her head at his startled look. "Believe me, that would be the least of my worries... I love Neville dearly, and he's desperately in need of mothering. I do it a bit already... between the two of us, we did get him through Potions alive, didn't we? I could quite happily go on with it. As for the rest..." She reached for his hand again, holding it gently. "I didn't expect you to suddenly fall into my arms and declare that, good heavens, now that you've given it a moment's thought, I AM your one true love after all. If you had, I'd have to have your head examined... or, at the least, I'd know that it WAS mostly gratitude, and that it probably wouldn't last. As for the charge of being self-defeating... haven't you ever wanted anything so very badly that you didn't dare to even hope for it, in case it didn't happen?"

She took a deep breath. "I just... Whether it works out for us or not, I will be here for you, whenever you need me. Or whenever you just want to discuss Arithmantic probability-calculations." Moving slowly and carefully, so as not to startle him, she leaned down to give his cheek a brief, gentle kiss. "Although I can't promise to be bracingly unsentimental ALL the time, I shall do my very best," she continued, straightening up reluctantly. "And should you find yourself wishing to fall into my arms at some later date, when you're sure about how you're feeling..."

He caught her hand awkwardly and thought about kissing it: settled instead for giving her fingers a gentle squeeze. "I'm more likely to edge tentatively towards your embrace than fall into it, especially in my current condition. But it's certainly a - a possibility. When I feel a little more settled. You've given me a great deal to think about."

And he would, wouldn't he? On heart-cold nights when he felt the cell walls still around him, when he knew that he was still and would always and forever be that whimpering, violated thing, waiting to be whittled down to nothing and crying for a respite which never came (except that it did, didn't it? in the end), he would be able to warm himself with the knowledge that somebody thought that he - he! - was something admirable and shining. And maybe he could somehow edge towards being what she thought he was, instead of what he knew himself to be...

She smiled at him, reaching down to smooth back his hair. "Thinking is good. I've always enjoyed it." Then, because the conversation was sliding towards a natural close, and he probably did need to think about it, she pulled away reluctantly and stood up. "And I think we both need a nice hot cup of tea," she said, in her best impersonation of Molly Weasley. "Which is, as you know, a cure for all emotional ills, especially when accompanied by a biscuit. The strongest variant, of course, requires the biscuit to be covered in chocolate... want one?"

There was a time, on the other side of nightmare, when he would have sneered at her simplistic solutions and forced jollity. But that other self was a thousand years ago, and right now a hot sweet drink and Granger doing her bouncy Edwardian nanny impression were part of the framework of blessed domesticity and safety which he could cling to to keep himself from drowning. "Thank you," he said gravely. "A cup of tea is, as you say, a universal panacea - but I would prefer Rich Tea biscuits to chocolate, if possible. They don't melt and make the tea taste funny if you dunk them."

* * *

**Author's note:**

Christian tribes living in southern Sudan tend to be very, very black, which is why Adrian is. They have suffered considerable persecution over the years, both from their own (Moslem) government and from independent Arab militias, although the situation isn't entirely one of armed soldiers terrorizing innocent civilians, since the southern Sudanese have (understandably) responded by fielding their own armed rebels.

Many historians believe that the Celts are descended from tribes in Scythia (an area north of Turkey). Something over three thousand years ago these proto-Celts split and headed in two directions, with the majority spreading throughout western Europe, and the remainder winding up in the Taklamakan area of China, where three-thousand-year-old Celtic-looking mummies have been found, complete with tartan clothes and Scythian-style tattoos and headresses.

"The Red Moron" - reference to the famous World War One German fighter-pilot Captain Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron.

Hermione probably only gained about two months'-worth of extra age by using the Time-Turner, but as she is officially less than three weeks short of eighteen-and-an-half at this point, the extra couple of months would be enough to tip her down the slide towards being unofficially nineteen.

There have been some queries recently as to why we have portrayed Snape as somebody who is capable of being fairly open and pleasant towards a close friend. An explanation of why we have interpreted him this way would be too long for the Author's Notes and might be considered to be non-story content, so instead I have posted an essay about it, entitled _Reserved!Snape - Canon or Fanon?_ on my website. You can find it at w w w . whitehound . co . uk / Fanfic / reserved-Snape . htm (just take out the spaces, and replace the hyphen with an underscore - I can't put the URL in properly because ffn's system would corrupt it, and evidently it won't display underscores at all).

This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, in order to include the fact that he did have that early friendship with Lily and had been in love once; to make him a year younger than the evidence in OotP had suggested; and to move the date of the werewolf "prank" back to early-to-mid fifth year. I've also changed the reference to being caught with his trousers down to being caught with his pants down, after a discussion on the Yahoo group Loose Canon concluded that wizards in general, and Snape in particular, probably don't wear trousers.


	14. 12 Time Goes By

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

**To those of you who are checking this looking for updates:** apologies for the delay, and don't worry, we haven't abandoned it. I, **whitehound**, have been having a lot of computer troubles, which entailed stripping most of the gubbins out of my PC and installing a new motherboard and cpu (can you say "Steep learning-curve"?) and am still as I write this stuck in 16 colours and 800x600 pixels, as well as having had both a violent go of the Winter Vomiting bug and the Uncommon Cold from Hell, and **Dyce** has got married and has also written a whole other HGSS novel, so we've both been a tad preoccupied lately. I have to get a new graphics card and I am determined to finish the chapter I am working on for my straight SF novel, and then a new chapter of _**Lost and Found**_ is the next thing on the agenda.

* * *

**12: TIME GOES BY**

"I know it doesn't feel much like it at the moment, Severus, but you _are_ making progress" Adrian said calmly, as Snape clutched at the stone bench for support and leaned on it heavily - leaned with both hands, the natural and the artificial, he noted with approval.

"I suppose so - Merlin, but I feel dizzy standing up. I'd forgotten how far away the ground is." He could feel his - "his" - left leg trying to give way under him again, but he was determined to remaining standing (if you could call it that) for as long as possible. At six feet and a jealously-guarded half inch he had been, _before_, accustomed to looking down on most people, except for malformed giraffes like Albus and Sirius bloody Black, and one of the most disturbing things about four and a half months of enforced bed-rest had been finding himself looking up at Filius Flitwick. He had never realized the little man had so much nasal hair - which he seemed for some unfathomable reason to have styled into ringlets.

He tried to straighten up and stand unsupported, but as soon as he let go of the bench his left leg began to fold. Adrian, who was a lot faster than he looked, caught him round the waist at once and guided him to the couch in a sort of synchronized stagger.

"Hell," Snape said, almost conversationally. "I hate this."

"It will get better, honest."

"I suppose. What do Muggles - what do Muggle cripples do, after they've crashed their explosive-powered tin-can cars? If they can't walk, I mean."

"If their spines are intact, they learn to use artificial limbs - like these, only not as sophisticated. If not... they use a wheelchair. You must have seen those, when you were a boy."

"Yes. Couldn't I - couldn't I use one? As a, an interim measure, I mean. At least then I'd be able to get to the bloody lavatory without help."

"I don't think it would work, unfortunately. A purely manually-powered chair - well, you'd need both hands to work it, otherwise you'd just spin in a circle. I've only once seen one that would work one-handed, and it needed a lot more upper-body strength than you have just yet. And an electric one just wouldn't work here, according to Poppy. I did discuss it with her. You'd have to get someone to push you - and that's no better than what you've got. You'll just have to stick with it and keep practising, leik."

"Bloody easy for you to say, isn't it?" Snape snarled. "Do you have any fucking idea what this is like?"

"No - but that's not my bloody fault, is it man? Hell, I know you're under stress, I can't even begin to imagine how much, but I'm trying to organize my own bloody wedding and do night duty as well, I don't need my bloody head bitten off just for trying to help, all right?"

Snape turned his face away. "I don't know why you put up with me, Addy, I really don't, but if your misguided sense of charity leads you to waste your time on a hopeless case that's not _my_ bloody fault either, is it?"

"I don't 'put up with you', you arse, and it's not charity; it's professional concern, and the fact that you've grown on me - like moss, leik." In truth, he was at least as fond of the dourly witty, prickly man as he was of any of his old college mates; more so, if anything.

Snape gave a little snort at that. "I see myself more as some bizarre fungus... one of the poisonous ones."

"All red, with little white spots?"

"Like some 1950s housewife's especially hideous summer dress? No, no - definitely something in black."

"I don't know any black fungi that are poisonous - and you're not really poisonous either. Just a bit bitter, leik."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Physically, he could see that Adrian was right - despite his continued failure to stand for more than a second or two at a time he had turned a corner, somewhere; his body was getting stronger almost by the day and he was now spending most of the day sitting up instead of dozing, and was able to see two or three solicitous visitors or traumatized Slytherins before his nerves began to fray too badly. Predictably, Horace had promptly manoeuvred him into helping with marking Potions essays - although he refused to mark the work of his carers or their immediate friends.

"It's not," as he told Neville with a frown, "that I'm afraid I might show undue favouritism; I'm more afraid I might mark them too harshly, for fear of showing favouritism."

"That's all right," Neville said cheerfully; "even if I was doing Potions this year you could hardly mark me any worse than I was. There isn't anything below 'Troll', is there?"

Mentally, it was another matter. He might be getting better at coping, outwardly; he might be able to go for as much as fifteen minutes without being held and without hyperventilating, now, provided it was daylight and someone was close enough to touch if he needed to; he might be able to talk to his colleagues for quite a long time and nearly enjoy doing so, and nearly not think that they ought to be recoiling from him in disgust. He might even (whisper it, don't even think it too loud, if fate offers you a sugar-lump there's bound to be a bridle in the other hand) experience a warmly self-satisfied glow every time he remembered that a brilliant, personable witch half his age found him attractive. Even if he still more than half thought she must be out of her mind.

But as Poppy fussed over him with her firm kindness, coaxing him back from the brink of the latest lacerating, wrenching flashback - as he lay on his back with his fingers knotted into the blankets, his breathing shallow and rapid, not daring to move - the part of him that still knew where it was knew that for all his progress he was still, always, poised on the edge of panic: sprawled precariously on a thin membrane stretched over roiling darkness, and much too terrified to move.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"You don't have to go through with this if you don't want to," Albus said gently.

Snape shook his head, wearily. "No - it's all right. It has to be done." He had tried before, months ago now, to extract the memory of being conveyed into the castle, and had got nothing but a swirl of jagged horror. His own fear of what he might see, combined with the anguish which had overwhelmed his senses at the time, had left the memory too confused to be useful. Yet he had been aware as he was carried in - hideously, agonizingly aware - and there ought to be some information there, if only one could decipher it.

And now that he had seen himself through Hermione's eyes... now that he had seen that ruined, rotting near-corpse splayed across the hospital bed and had somehow managed not to vomit, he felt better-prepared for what he might see inside his own head. Or outside it. He looked down at the polished surface of the stone bench for a moment, frowning in concentration, and then touched his wand to his temple and began to draw out the silver skein of memory.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Albus's hand on his own was an anchor in nightmare, in memory fractured like broken glass, jagged and savage - at least he didn't have to re-experience the pain but he remembered the pain, he could see his own torn body jerking and twitching in the belly of the boat, blurred figures, movement, himself arching up in convulsion, the ripped mouth trying to scream -

And again, Albus's hand gripping his tightly, the other man's nails biting into the side of his hand as they plunged through the silver surface of the mirror once more - the image blurred, stretched, leapt, there was nothing in it in focus except the focus of his pain, the skeletal, still-breathing carcase jerking, arching in desperation as a booted foot kicked again and again at its groin, at its torn arse, at its open, overflowing belly, and there were voices, jeering, saying something -

And again - the Pensieve like a bowl of quicksilver and clouds, pain pain pain the grey pre-dawn sky spinning above him, jab and jab and his skin blistering and peeling where the acid-soaked cloth touched and the boat swinging wildly under him, a masculine voice jeering, mocking him and a female voice giggling and another one saying something hard and commanding -

And again - he was going to be sick, he knew he was, he couldn't separate himself from the half-dead thing twisting and flopping like a fish in the bottom of the boat as the foot lashed into his side, his crotch, his belly over and over, as the memory of pain lanced through him with every blow and a loud, hearty-sounding voice that was almost familiar crowed "Like that, do you? Look at him jump!" and a female voice laughed, shrill and inane, and a second one snapped "Leave it, Cormac - you'll have us all in the water!"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

He clung to the older man, gasping and shuddering, tears coursing down his scarred cheeks and soaking into the white beard as Albus rocked him like a child and crooned wordlessly. After five minutes that felt like forever, Snape mastered his own breathing and his surging nausea enough to disengage from the other man's arms and sit back, his mouth pursed into its accustomed expression of dour disapproval. "McLaggen," he said sourly. His bowed head was turned aside, his skin was deathly white and he was still shivering so hard he looked blurred, but his voice was firm and acidic and the Headmaster's mouth twitched into a smile under the shelter of his beard. "He's just the type, isn't he Albus? An empty-headed idiot who thinks the world owes him a living, and is prepared to go to any lengths to get the power and adulation he imagines himself entitled to."

"McLaggen and, it would seem, two of his, ah, female conquests."

"And what a lot of ground that covers."

"It could be any two of dozens, could it not? Did you recognize either of the female voices? I fear you have had far more contact with the individual students than I have, in recent years."

Snape looked up then, the lines of strain bracketing his mouth and eyes. "I don't remember, I can't - they both seem slightly familiar but the - what happened last year, it affected me, my memory, I lost a lot of the - of the fine detail. And it's no use using the Pensieve for that, because I wouldn't know where to start."

"Indeed - we don't even know what year they are in. McLaggen I know finished school last summer, but whether the two females with him were past students or current ones - the fact that you were not intercepted by the squid tends to suggest current students, but it could have been your presence which..."

"Did Hagrid actually follow through and ask the squid about it, do you know?"

"Not to my knowledge; he was, rather, ah, under the weather when he suggested it."

"He was three sheets to the wind."

"Even if - even if it was current students, I don't believe that they pose any present threat to you. The wards on these rooms - "

"Yes. It's not - not the danger that concerns me. Much. But the thought that I could be marking the essays of two of my own - torturers..."

"Will you give me permission to take a copy of this Pensieved memory and show it to the other Heads of House, to see if they recognize the voices?"

The younger man scowled at him for a moment, tight-lipped, then nodded sharply. "Very well. But warn - warn Pomona in advance. So far as I know she didn't see me when I was... opened."

"Do you - do you want to reclaim the memory, or would you rather..."

"Lose a piece of my mind? I don't feel that I have it to spare. And you know us Slytherins, Albus; everything which is mine, is mine. Even the bits I don't want."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Re-absorbing the memory was bad, it was so bad, but there were arms that held him, the one strong and the one withered, a firm embrace to keep him anchored in the reality of friends, of comparative safety, of (comparative) recovery. "I'm sorry," he murmured, when the shivering fit was finally done; "sorry to be such a burden."

"Severus, you have every right to expect to be given every help you need, not just for friendship's sake but for everything which you have sacrificed for the Order."

"But I blew it, didn't I Albus? After a few weeks of - of pain I told them - I told the Dark Lord everything I knew. Thanks to me, he knows at least roughly where our headquarters are, he knows as much as you've told me about the prophecy, he knows you found the Peverell ring and broke it, knows that I suspected you thought the diary and the ring were both Horcruxes, even if you never used the word then, and the damned locket you were so keen to get - damnit, why did you tell me so much? You knew my position was precarious at best, that this might happen - "

"If I hadn't taken you into my confidence, dear boy, I would have been dead twice over - once from the curse which withered my arm, which would have spread and killed me if I hadn't come to you at once, and once from the poison I drank whilst retrieving the false locket. Nobody else has your skill - and could you have treated me half so well, if you hadn't known what caused my injuries?"

"I suppose not... but oh, damnit Albus, what's the use, now he knows we know about them, he knows you cleansed him from the Peverell ring - suppose he decides to replace it with another? Will I be responsible for him committing another murder?"

"If so, he is responsible, not you - you cannot take his sins on your shoulders, dear boy."

Snape made a harsh noise. "I've enough of a burden carrying my own."

"Which were never as grave as you seem to think, and which you have expiated long since."

"You say so _now_" Snape said, restless and fretful, "because you pity me, so you want to soften the blow - but when I first came to you with my sins on my hands you told me I was disgusting because I - because I cared more about a friend than about an enemy."

"I was... interpreting your actions in the light of - of prior experiences which involved other people entirely, and I think now that I was wrong to do so. You proved to be... of much higher quality than I mistakenly thought at the time. You aren't an easy man to know, Severus, and I could never breach your shields and see your heart, then, even when I tried to destabilize you by attacking you. But I've seen it often enough since, with your permission, and I know it to be a sound one. And at least, thanks to you and Horace, we now know how _many_ Horcruxes there are, and Tom does not know that we know. I will not have you troubling yourself so much about it. I will tell you again, as your friend, your employer and your commanding officer, that the war is not your concern at present, except as a matter of abstract interest.

"As far as Horcrux hunting goes, Harry and I have the matter well in hand. If I am poisoned, blasted or shrivelled again in the process you may advise Horace as to appropriate treatment for this ageing carcase, but other than that your primary concern, and your only task, is to become again as well as you can be. Rest when you are tired, exercise when Adrian tells you to, and be a little frivolous - for once in your life. Lie down with me now."

"It's quite true," Snape said drowsily as he curled himself down into the reassuring contact, his head pillowed on his friend's good arm. "I feel myself to be in some sense always skating on thin ice, now, but I'm _good_ at that, and despite everything that happened - last year, and the, the physical and psychological consequences, in some ways I am less tense than I can remember ever being. No spying; no immediate danger; no responsibility - no classroom full of infuriating dunderheads and mannerless brats to ignore me, just three bright, academically-minded students who want to hear what I want to tell them, which is just... And sleep. Do you know how wonderful it is, Albus, to be able to sleep whenever I am tired?"

A soft snore, like the distant murmur of approaching thunder, told him that Albus probably did know.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Stand still, Pomona, do, while I calibrate this." He touched the there-and-not-there components delicately in a complex sequence, and the thing whirred and chimed and glittered like moonshine. "Favourite breakfast cereal, equivalent weight in split lentils, name of Imaginary Friend - _really_?"

"We don't talk about that."

"What's it worth not to tell - ?"

"Don't you bloody dare."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

As nightmares went, it wasn't one of the worst - no literally blow-by-blow retelling of agony, just a vast formless unease, a sense of something soft and amorphous and horrible lurking behind his shoulder, waiting to pounce. Nevertheless, he was shamingly grateful to wake and find himself safe in his own bed, with a brisk March wind probing the edges of the window-panes.

He lay for a long time in silence, just feeling the here-and-now, the luxurious way his body, what there was left of it, sank into the yielding mattress, the warm weight of the blankets and the firelight glimmering softly across the tapestries which covered the worn stone walls.

Not the least of pleasures was the warm presence of another body next to his in the soft darkness, a hand laid lightly on his arm, tethering him to sanity and to this strange, fantasy world in which he actually mattered to somebody. He had not even woken her, this time, the dream had been so mild - or perhaps she was just too weary.

He lay and watched her as firelight danced across her skin and the sky outside began almost imperceptibly to lighten, a frown tightening between his brows to see how very tired the blasted girl did look. Under the circumstances, he found himself quite grateful that she did not look like a cherubic innocent but she shouldn't resemble a careworn woman of thirty, either. Between school work and fretting over him she was clearly over-doing it, and he ought to tell her to leave except that, amazingly, that would probably worry her even more.

And it was a novel experience, even if an unnerving one, to find himself sharing a pillow with a personable young woman who found him attractive - personally attractive, too, as himself, not just as a male who happened to be an available dick at some rowdy Death Eater revel. As he watched her Hermione stirred slightly and the hand on his arm tightened. She smiled in her sleep at that, although her face was still weary and strained. Seeing that tired little creasing of her forehead as her breath stirred a stray strand of unruly hair, he found himself suddenly a little breathless himself, and fighting the urge to brush that errant curl aside and kiss her on her still faintly-curving lips.

The wind rattled the window-panes abruptly and Hermione opened her eyes and smiled drowsily at him. This was so like a number of her dreams that it took her a moment to realize that she really was awake, and being watched intently. "Did you have 'nother nightmare?" she murmured, snuggling a little closer and rubbing her eyes. "I'm sorry I didn't wake up..." The look on his face was... nice. Intent and warm and much softer than usual.

"That's all right, it was nothing too terrible" Snape replied in a brisk tone which sounded false even to himself. He could feel his ears turning pink under her dreamy scrutiny. "Just routine creeping dread - not much different from teaching a class with Potter in it, really."

"Mmm. That's good." She yawned, lifting a hand to brush his hair absently back from his face. "Well, not good, but better." He was going a bit pink, for some reason, and she smiled again - he was particularly endearing when he was blushing and awkward. "Is there anything I can do?"

Right now he could think of several things she could do, but he didn't dare say any of them. He swallowed, and hoped she wouldn't notice his Adam's apple bobbing. "No, I'm all right. Really." For the sake of having something to do, even though it was only twenty to seven and rather early for getting up, he fumbled after his wand and used it to start the tea things brewing. While the kettle was heating up, Hermione used Mobilicorpus to help him get to and from the bathroom.

Afterwards they sat up in bed side by side, sipping Twinings' best English Breakfast tea as a grey dawn lightened the sky above the lake, although the early sun itself was not visible from this angle. Hermione was obviously still barely awake, and looked as if she might fall face-first into her cup. Snape stared at his own tea without really seeing it, trying to collect his scattered nerves. "I was just... thinking," he said quietly. "About - about what we were discussing the other day."

Hermione blinked, floundering towards the surface of her own mind. "Er... trans-time probability nodes?"

"Ah - no. About what might happen if - well. If I was able to, er, return your feelings."

"Oh." Hermione blushed a bit herself, trying not to feel too hopeful. "Uhm... what were you thinking?" She fiddled a bit nervously with the edge of the blanket, arranging her face in what she hoped was a receptive-but-not-overeager expression.

"That it... well, as I told you, I don't know if I could ever come to feel as you feel, or, or how I would react, now, to the idea of somebody taking a... physical interest in me. But it has occurred to me that it will be very difficult to answer those questions without to some extent, ah, testing the waters. In a manner of speaking." There were several stock manners of speaking which might apply to his situation. "You won't know till you try it" was acceptable, but "Suck it and see" was rather unfortunate, and as he thought it he could feel a blush starting to turn the edges of his horrible early-morning beard-shadow purple.

"That's true," Hermione said, trying harder than ever not to sound overeager. "A trial run would certainly seem like a good idea... a sort of test under controlled conditions. I mean, you wouldn't try some completely new potion at full strength first go, and this is at least as important as that." She would take trial status and be thankful for it, under the circumstances.

Snape looked at her obliquely over his teacup, raising his eyebrows. "Granger, you are nattering. Hermione. Why are you nattering?" Truth be told, he had very little idea what to do next, and was stalling for time.

Hermione blushed furiously, looking down into her cup. "Because I'm nervous," she said in a small voice. "And trying not to be too... too hopeful, because I really don't want to push you into anything."

Snape looked at her with his head on one side like a curious crow, glittering and faintly malicious. "Nervous because I might do something," he said with the beginnings of a smirk, "or nervous because I might _not_?"

"Nervous because you might not want me," she said honestly. "So because you might not, really." Blushing again, she sipped her tea, giving him a look that tried to be honest and open and succeeded only in being pleading.

"As a general rule," Snape said seriously, gazing thoughtfully at the pattern on the bedspread, "I quite enjoy making my students nervous. But in this case, I find myself curiously reluctant to do so, which may be a further indication that I do not, in fact, regard you as a student."

"Oh." Hermione went pink, fiddling happily with her cup. If he didn't want her to be nervous, and she was nervous about him not being interested, then that meant he _was_, didn't it? "I'm glad you don't regard me as a student. I'd be rather crushed if you did, actually, after I've tried so hard to show you that there's more to me than just a constantly waving hand."

"Indeed," he said gravely, "you have, at least _in potentia_, an excellent mind, and a lively if somewhat aggravating personality. As to your - physical attributes," he said delicately, pausing for a sip of cooling tea, "I can personally testify that there is _much_ more to you than just your hands. Thanks, that is, to the - towel incident."

Hermione went from pink to scarlet. "Er... yes... well..." She couldn't even look at him now, ducking her head so her hair would hide her face. "I'm glad you... uh... think so."

"Most definitely." He finished the tea and set his cup aside, grinning to himself. "My dear good girl, if you wish to attempt a - _relationship_, even as a trial run, you are going to have to get used to me being provoking. As well as to the idea that I might... enjoy looking at you."

"I like it when you're provoking," she mumbled, glancing up at him shyly. "It's just... uhm... I'm not really used to anyone enjoying looking at me, let alone actually doing it."

"Neither am I," he replied honestly. "Even before I was... But I thought that we might - well, practise together. So long as it is clearly understood, on both sides, that it _is_ just a trial run. I do not wish to find myself the object of furious recriminations, nor do I wish to spoil our - our friendship," (there - he'd said it!), "if either of us should eventually decide that the trial isn't working out." He cleared his throat. "And it would be a good idea if you started calling me Severus, not Professor, and I will endeavour to call you Hermione. I've never been into, ah, sexual rôle play and I _really_ don't want to feel as if I am playing at being the stern teacher ravishing the innocent schoolgirl, even if - even if some people would say that that was what we were doing."

"Of course." Hermione wrinkled her nose. "And that's not at all what you're doing. If anything, we're in a real-life version of 'nurse seduces vulnerable patient' and I don't like that one much either. I'd much rather 'friends seeing if they can be more than friends', really." She smiled shyly at him. "I would like to call you Severus, though. And for you to call me Hermione." It would be so damned hard not to get her hopes up too much... still, even a trial was more than she'd ever expected.

"I don't think you can fairly be accused of seducing me - at least, not in that... pejorative sense, since you had to rely on Longbottom to play matchmaker. Indeed, I would say you've been - admirably professional, which is more than I'm certain of in myself at this point. At least, I'm _not_ teaching you, or at least not in the formal sense of being responsible for your grades _et cetera_ - I don't think just talking about your essays for other people counts - and the nurse/patient situation means that I am not taking advantage of a position of authority. At least, I hope not.

"As for you taking advantage of your authority over me, as my - my carer, I thought we already agreed that I seem to have a bit of a _tendresse_ for bossy women. I'm old enough not to need protection from something which I might rather enjoy. Just don't - don't overdo it, and for the love of God don't shout at me. I don't think having a panic attack and throwing up would be very romantic."

"Well, I've been hoping you do still like them. Bossy women, I mean." Hermione smiled, reaching out to tentatively take his hand. "And I certainly know better than to shout at you, after all this time. If it's absolutely necessary to be cross with you, if you put yourself in danger again or something, I'll have to resort to either reasoning with you persistently until you give in - and I can do that for a really long time - or threatening to cry. And I don't think either of those would work on you, so perhaps I won't bother."

Privately, he thought they might both work quite well, but he wasn't going to say so; it went against his Slytherin instincts to hand her a weapon to use against him, even if it would be wielded for his own good. "You may... chivvy me for my own benefit, however. Albus has been amusing himself by doing so, and I quite like it - even though I tell him I don't." He rubbed his thumb lightly across the back of her hand, feeling the bones there as thin and light as a bird's.

"I could fuss. I fuss very well, I've been practising on the boys for years." Hermione grinned, on surer ground now. "I can also bustle, although I don't really have the hips for it yet. If you don't look after yourself, I'll give you such a bustling that you'll think Mrs Weasley's here, maybe that will work."

"Now, I didn't think it was hip-size which was really the issue when bustling, considering that a bustle is an, um, an artificially enlarged... derriere. In which respect, Molly is also more generously provided for than you."

"It's that whole area." Hermione made a vague encircling gesture in the area of her hips, going a little pink. "All the way around, really." She looked down at herself. She was sadly lacking in "around"... a trip around her circumference wasn't a lengthy one at any point up or down. "Still, I can trot about being cheerful and bossy and convinced I know best, which is the _spirit_ of bustling."

"Indeed." He looked at her gravely, although he could feel his own lips quirking at the corners. The best thing about provoking Gra... Hermione was how well she played up to it. "And since I only have the one arm at present, I should perhaps be glad that you aren't _too_ much of an armful, otherwise it might be difficult to reach... everything which I had it in mind to reach."

Hermione blushed furiously, but shifted a little bit closer. "In the spirit of giving this a proper trial, perhaps you should try that," she suggested hopefully. "Er, putting the arm around the rather limited armful, I mean. In an experimental capacity."

Snape felt himself stiffen - drew a deep and careful breath and forced himself to relax again. "Yes, it - would seem logical," he agreed, carefully. "I'm not sure - not sure how I'm going to handle I mean _react_ to a situation in which I am being touched in a way which is even quasi-sexual, but we have to start somewhere. If we're going to. Only it would be a great deal easier if you came round the other side of me."

Hermione nodded. Setting down her teacup, she slid off the bed and moved around it to sit near him. "We do have to start somewhere," she said, taking a deep breath. "I'm nervous too, if it helps at all... but we've had lots of practice with snuggling up already. It's more or less the same thing, just... more cuddly." That had sounded so silly. She hoped it was at least reassuring.

Squeamishly aware of how awkward he must look, having to move himself using his backside and one hand, Snape shuffled over to "her" side of the bed, then patted the mattress next to him. Hermione edged closer, and he tweaked the blankets up over her knees and then sat for a moment, not quite looking at her. His breath, he found, was stumbling over an uneasy mixture of half-formed desire and latent panic, and the blood was singing in his ears. But he had spent his entire life riding roughshod over his own fears and at least this time he knew, intellectually, that he was in no real danger of anything except making a fool of himself.

Drawing a deep, shuddering breath to steady himself, he leaned against Hermione lightly, nearly but not quite resting his head on her shoulder, and looped his arm around her back. As he felt her own arm ease carefully around his waist, he was grateful for the foresight, or instinct, or whatever it was which had led them both to brush their teeth when they used the bathroom earlier, so that neither of them had to confront the other one's morning breath. Aesthetics aside, the cleaner and more quiet and controlled everything between them was, the less it reminded him of Macnair's foul mouth coming down over his, and - biting his lip and forcing the memory aside with a little flick of his head, he tightened his arm around Hermione's ribs, and wished distractedly that he had thought to shave.

Hermione nestled tentatively against him, tucking herself into his arm. It felt nice - more than nice - and she sighed contentedly, curling her own arm gently around him. Not too tight, for fear of upsetting him, but holding him close. They rested like that for a minute, and when he didn't draw away or seem upset, Hermione ventured a light, brief kiss on his stubbled cheek. He hadn't minded that, the last time, and they did have to start somewhere.

Snape flinched, slightly but definitely, forced himself to relax and turned into her kiss, see-sawing queasily between terror and tentative desire. At this level of proximity, desire was definitely winning. He knew what he wanted to do, now; instincts which were a long time out of practice were starting to kick in, his body was telling his brain what it wanted and his brain started to tell his body how to go about it, and that was where it all fell apart - He folded forward into Hermione's arms and rested his head on her shoulder, feeling horribly like crying. "Damn - oh, damn! This isn't going to work."

Hermione released her hold on him at once. "Oh, S-Severus, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to go too fast..."

"It's not that," he growled, shaking his head against her shoulder. "Not your fault." He drew back and glared at her wildly, all haggard and unshaven as he was. "I wanted - I _wanted_ it to work. I could feel it starting to work, I was going to be all, all bloody _suave_ and lift your chin up with my fingertips and kiss you properly, at least a little bit - and then I realized that I couldn't, because I didn't have a bloody arm any more on that side." He made a harsh, self-derisive noise like the cry of a crow. "And it's no good trying it with Filius's prosthetic, because the way my control of the thrice-damned thing is going, I'd probably miss and stick my bloody fingers up your nose."

Which was not even to mention the routine, humiliating difficulty of working out where to put his nose when he kissed somebody; but they could fall off that particular bridge if they ever reached it.

"Oh, Severus..." She lifted a hand to smooth his hair back, keeping her touch gentle. He flinched a little, but he didn't pull away. "It's... I wish I could make this better for you. Easier. I want you to be happy because of this, not miserable." She lowered her head to rub her cheek lightly against his shoulder. "Until the prosthetic is working properly, I think I could manage tilting my own chin if there's a kiss in it for me..."

Snape gave a wild little laugh. "Nothing is ever _easy_. Whenever I want to, to impress a girl with how bloody sophisticated I am, fate always manages to dump me on my arse, one way or another. At least this time," he added cryptically, more to himself than to her, "I wasn't wearing my oldest and most horrible underpants." He sighed and then nodded at her rather curtly. "Well - go on, then."

Hermione blinked at him, looking nervously hopeful, and tilted her face up towards his. He tightened his arm around her ribs, drawing her closer, and bent his head down rather cautiously - and yes, there it was, bang on cue. After a moment of irritable readjustment, trying to find an angle which didn't squash his nose against her cheek, his lips met hers in a feather-soft touch which jolted through him like electricity. As Hermione seemed to move and flow in the curve of his arm, her whole body rising into the kiss, he parted his lips slightly against hers and tried to remember how to breathe.

Hermione shivered, her bones feeling decidedly melty as they kissed each other slowly and tentatively. When their lips parted, she couldn't keep the silly, adoring smile from spreading across her face, or her fingers from coming up to brush his rough cheek very gently. "Oh, my..."

Snape sat back and looked at her, his heart pounding until he felt giddy and almost sick. It wasn't just the kiss itself, as enjoyable as that was, but the feeling that somehow, against all the odds, he had reclaimed a little power over his own body - that Lucius and Macnair had not after all succeeded in taking this away from him.

And she was looking at him - him! - as if he was something wonderful and worth looking at. He had always preferred to avoid mirrors, even before he was scarred, but he had a vivid idea of what he looked like first thing in the morning, before he had had a shave and a shower and several cups of coffee. But the imbecile, astonishing girl was looking at him as if he was some sort of Muggle film-star, or a _Witch Weekly_ poster-boy like Lockhart. He ducked his head in embarrassment, but he could feel a silly, satisfied smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth. "That was - reasonably satisfactory. For a first experiment."

That head-duck and tiny smile were both encouraging and so adorable that Hermione slid down several notches further into "complete melt". "I thought so," she said happily, cuddling against his side a bit. "Although I think we might have to do it again a few times just to be absolutely sure that our results were accurate and properly indicative of future chemistry."

"I would think so," Snape replied gravely. "But right now - right now what I want to do is to lie down again with you in my arms - my arm - and go back to sleep for..." he glanced at the clock, "half an hour or so. And then wake up and kiss you again. And then have a shower and a shave, so that I am as near to presentable as I ever can be, and kiss you again. And then have breakfast in bed with you, and then, perhaps, if Albus is not too punctual and you still have time before your first class..."

"Kiss me again?"

* * *

**Author's note:**

We are never actually told how tall Snape is, but Narcissa is specified as being tall, and Snape is enough taller than her that he can noticeably look down at her when they are standing on a level. On the other hand he is visibly shorter than Sirius, who is himself not so unnaturally tall as to invite comment. So I'm assuming Narcissa is about 5'9", Sirius is about 6'2" or 6'3", and Snape is around the 6ft mark.

_As Time Goes By_ is, of course, the title of a 1930s song which famously includes the line "A kiss is just a kiss".

This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to reduce the amount which Dumbledore had told Snape about the Horcruxes prior to his capture; to specify that in this time-line Albus called Snape as soon as possible after the ring-curse hit him, and that is why he is still alive; and to begin to address the fact that Albus had been very harsh to Snape in the past.

In the light of various reviewers' comments about how we have chosen to portray Snape and Hermione in this fic, and whether we have made Snape too open or noble etc., we have posted an essay called _Reserved!Snape - Canon or Fanon?_ which can be found at www . whitehound . co . uk / Fanfic (just remove spaces - ffn won't accept posting URLs as such).

Also in light of some reviewers' comments I feel I should point out, once again, that Hermione is nearly three years over the age of consent. Whether or not Americans would consider her a bit young at not-quite-nineteen, these are British characters in a British cultural setting, and to Britons there really wouldn't be anything very remarkable about a nearly-nineteen-year-old taking up with a thirty-something, so long as the thirty-something wasn't in authority over the younger partner. A friend of mine in his early forties got into a passionate, serious relationship with a not-quite-eighteen-year-old and nobody was especially surprized or shocked (although admittedly he might not have done it if she hadn't lied and told him she was twenty-one).

In autumn 1998 it was made illegal for a person in authority to have sex with a person who was under their authority and less than eighteen, unless they were married; but eighteen is the age of absolute majority in Britain for all except three purposes (driving a heavy goods vehicle, becoming a council member or MP or owning a business which sells alcohol), and is so regarded. Hell, even the fact that one of my schoolteachers (in the 1970s) eloped with an eighteen-year-old current pupil didn't raise that many eyebrows, although it would have done had she been younger.

**PLEASE NOTE:** **whitehound**'s solo story _Sons of Prophecy_ has been nominated in the Azkaban category of the **The Sorting Hat Harry Potter Thematic Fanfiction Awards**. Readers who liked it enough to vote for it should go to **The Sorting Hat** at partial-eclipse . net / sortinghat / (yes there's no www) and cast their vote between 18th September and 1st October 2006.


	15. 13 Language and Literature

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**13: LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE**

"IgotanowlIgotanowl - they're going to publish!" He waved the letter wildly in the air and made a vague gesture as if he was going to hug Snape, who ducked.

"Curb your enthusiasm, Longbottom!" Having someone hold him when he was feeling fragile and distraught was one thing; but sudden outbreaks of manly fervour were altogether too continental. "I'm pleased for you, seriously, but there's no call to get carried away. May I see?"

Neville handed the parchment over and then perched on the edge of the couch next to him, bouncing up and down slightly on the spot. "I have to decide now whether to publish under my own name, or a quill-name."

"And what pseudonym would you use, I wonder? The Detonator? Mr Toad, perhaps?"

"Well - to be honest, most people usually just call me Shortarse."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Albus, I _wish_ you would let me do it. Twice already you've only survived by the skin of your teeth and my bloody skill, and even if you and Golden Wonder-boy do manage to retrieve Helga's cup without a fatality, trying to neutralize it is going to be third-time-unlucky, believe me."

"It's by no means certain that the cup will be very heavily protected: the diary after all was not."

"But the ring and the locket and the godamn snake _were_ - are. And thanks to me he knows what happened to the ring, and that he needs to increase security. Anyone who tries to denature that cup is going to be cursed to a bloody smoking _cinder_."

"But that is precisely where you are wrong, dear boy. Horace is brewing the Felix felicis for Harry and myself even as we speak. It should be ready by the summer, and we can keep the cup under a stasis spell meantime."

"I'm amazed that he hasn't already roped me in to help make it - I shall expect him at my door imminently. But - yes, that might work. It's certain you're going to need all the bloody help you can get, because He will know that you are looking. Thanks to my bloody - weakness."

"You know what I think about the matter, and I am not going to let you martyr yourself to destroy a Horcrux. That is my final word on the matter - you've already been martyred more than sufficiently."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Rolanda Hooch's strange eyes, yellow as a hawk's beneath her feather-like cap of short grey hair, observed him dispassionately as he struggled for balance. Adrian always insisted that he _was_ getting better at it, and he supposed that being assigned to a physical fitness instructor instead of a healer was a sign of progress; but progress in the sense of forward motion was still somewhat lacking, and it was embarrassing to have Rolanda have to seize him by the elbow and hold him up bodily to prevent him from measuring his length on the stone floor. It was even more embarrassing to realize that the bloody woman could do it one-handed. Still, she was someone else for whose kindness and patience he had unexpected cause to be grateful.

Almost ten days now since he and Albus had looked into the Pensieve - and despite the fragile, infinitely repeatable wonder of kissing Hermione, the memory of the decanted memory of himself split open like a rotten plum, brutalized and shamed in every way possible and utterly helpless at the mercy of those who had no mercy at all, had eaten into his brain until he felt infested with it, contaminated; until it ran through his head like a fracture of broken glass, stirring up jagged shards of horror.

Yet, in an odd way, it was almost a pleasure to think about that queasy horror and know that it had brought him, less than two days later, into kindness and care and unexpected friendship; Adrian bringing him wine and choosing, for whatever strange reasons of his own, to continue to take an interest in him even after it was no longer strictly necessary; Albus metamorphosing from stern commander to concerned mentor; Longbottom - of all people - bringing him a spun handful of coloured light and music to hang over his bed; Poppy wiping his clammy skin with something which smelled of fresh air and lavender; Lovegood reading to him by firelight; Hermione talking quietly to him and brushing his hair...

As if it had happened in a dream, past the confused tangle of overstretched senses and the heavy fog of absolute exhaustion which had clouded his perceptions at the time, he remembered careful hands lifting him up and sliding a soft fleece under him, under the clean linen sheets, to ease his sore bones; and the comfort and warmth that that had brought him went all the way through to the soul.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Adrian had his own problems, at present. Snape found, somewhat to his surprise, that he rather wished he could have gone to the young surgeon's wedding; and since that was still clearly impossible, Pomona had obliged him by visiting Hogsmeade and bringing back a huge box of Chocoballs, filled with clotted cream and strawberry mousse, and another of whisky-filled Chocolate Cauldrons: both sweets which Adrian's guests would never have encountered before, but which did not involve any alarming magical special effects. To the depths of his soul, he envied the younger man the life he would lead - a useful, prestigious, morally unambiguous career, a stable, loving family, and somebody who cared for him, to come home to at night.

But he certainly didn't envy him the preparatory stage. Adrian still made the effort to come through at least once a week - a fact which gave Snape a thrill of embarrassed pleasure and surprise every time he thought about it - but his nerves were on a short fuse, and he was starting to go a nasty greyish colour, under the black.

"It's not," he said, "that I'm not ecstatic about getting married, leik. But I have eleven aunts and uncles none of whom are speaking to the others, hardly, and half the buggers are lactose-intolerant and I have to sit them so none of them takes precedence over any of the others or they'll all fight, and Immie's only got two aunts but one is a bloody Vegan and the other one's a drunk who has to be kept away from the punch at all costs. And Immie 'phoned me this morning to say that the caterers have cancelled. Damn," he added, looking down to see that he had clenched the plastic carry-out knife in his left hand so hard that it had just snapped, and had driven a spike of itself into the palm of his hand.

"Show me," Snape said commandingly, as thick blood well up in the hollow of his friend's hand, though the sight and the iron smell of it brought a cold wash of nausea to clutch at his throat and prickle across his skin. Adrian held his hand out, wordlessly, and Snape swallowed hard and passed the end of his wand across it, singing under his breath a humming, buzzing, lilting little tune, and the cut flesh healed itself again.

"Damn," Adrian said again. "I wish - "

"I know. But that's one of the reasons we - why we keep ourselves apart. There are less than ten thousand wizards in Britain, of whom perhaps one in thirty has much useful healing ability, and of those, perhaps a quarter can heal to professional standard."

"That's... about eighty, right?"

"Or less. And most of those are already working at St Mungo's. What would you do with let's say twenty wizarding healers, spread out over every Muggle hospital in Britain?"

"Work them to death, maybe literally - and there'd be riots, nearly, when people found out their relatives _could_ have been saved, and weren't, because there weren't enough wizards to go round. Yeah, I do see."

"Also, in some ways magic is the - the lazy solution. You proved it yourself, on me, that for some purposes Muggle medicine is actually better, and if you had that, that lazy way out, you might not work so hard to find treatments which _could_ be available for all."

"I do see. But even so, I can't help wishing..."

Snape looked at him for a moment and then shut his eyes, unwilling to witness the younger man's resignation and regret. "When I can walk again, if you really need me, I will come. If you think that my - my intervention really would make the difference between life and death for a patient, if it's something that I _can_ cure, I will come. I owe you that."

"I didn't do it so you'd owe me, ya tube."

"Even so. But it must be done in a way that can be concealed from the Muggle authorities _and_ the wizarding ones. It would not have been a kindness to save me for Azkaban, believe me."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Going behind the Ministry's back was one thing - nearly a duty, and certainly a pleasure. Deceiving Albus was quite another matter, and he wondered uneasily if he should tell him about this - thing - between himself and Hermione. If he had still been teaching, or if there had even been any chance that he _would_ be teaching again before she finished school... except that in that case he would never have allowed the _thing_ to go so far in the first place. Strictly, he was a civilian at present, and the... thing was none of Albus's business, at least professionally.

Even so, not telling the old man felt vaguely dishonest, in a way that lying through his teeth to the Dark Lord never had. Albus would certainly be interested on a personal level, and might be concerned about the appearance of the matter; even if he and Hermione were no longer teacher and student, and would never be so again.

But Albus himself had never for a moment been honest with him, or with anyone, if it suited Albus's purposes not to be; and he was reluctant to discuss something which was still so fragile, and so private - private to Hermione, not just to himself. He himself might have no privacy left, in the face of someone who had nursed him and cleaned him when he had been reduced to a mindless, cringing, incontinent near-corpse - but he had no desire to see Hermione accused of taking advantage of her position as his carer, and if - as he more than half expected - she came to her senses and decided she would prefer someone younger and more prepossessing, it would be better for her never to have been tainted by association.

Even if he was coming to suspect that she was a great deal less innocent than she appeared... the reverse of himself as a teenager, who had always somehow looked and sounded guilty even when he was absolutely sincere.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Well, a 'tube' is a Scots expression for a fool or a useless person. I don't know whether that's because a tube is something which looks solid but is really hollow, or whether it's an, um, male genital reference." He had started to regret offering to teach Hermione how to swear, almost as soon as she had insisted on taking him up on it. It was astonishing, really, how many British swearwords were really embarrassingly sexual, when you started to examine them, and every time he blushed she grinned at him, which made him go even pinker.

And it was difficult not to flinch at the ones which were homosexual references. They would not have bothered him, _before_, despite his history with Lucius; but now it was hard not to think of them in relation to himself, in a context which had been very definitely neither consensual nor pleasurable...

Hermione's bright voice cut across him and derailed his train of thought, for which he was more than grateful. "So that must mean that 'tube' means pretty-much the same as 'wanker', then?"

"Well, ah - in its application, broadly, yes, but in its actual etymology..." He took a sip of tea to help cover his discomfiture.

"Yes, understood - it's all right, you don't have to spell it out. Again." She grinned at him. "And 'mince' is Scots for anything which is no good like, um, a really bad Quidditch team - so what's a minge-er?"

Snape swallowed his tea the wrong way. When he had stopped coughing, he looked away from her, blushing, and muttered "A 'minge' is a girl's - furry - down there." He forced himself to make eye-contact, though Hermione's eyes were dancingly amused. "I suspect you mean 'minger', rhyming with 'singer' rather than 'singe'. A minger is a person of either sex, or sometimes an object, which is thoroughly unattractive and unappetizing. Like - "

He looked away again and shut his eyes, gesturing rather helplessly at himself. After a moment, he felt her feather-light kiss brush against the corner of his eye.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Hagrid knelt by the shallows, staring at an oddly-shaped eye bigger than a human head: alien, and yet weirdly intelligible and expressive. The thick tentacle, like a boneless pink arm, fumbled at his wrist before the suckers latched onto the proffered steak, and drew it down under the water.

After a squelchy, blood-stained interlude, the squid raised its tentacles again, and a wave of colour flickered over them and chased across its back, like lightning strobing across a dark sky. "Boat," Hagrid said, "in th' autumn - na' one o' they shoal that swims after me. A lone swimmer - with an injured man on board?"

Colours, patterns, even textures formed and re-formed across the creature's skin as Hagrid questioned it, using its own flesh as a living canvas, and the arm-tentacles gestured insistently. Once, one of the long, serpent-like main tentacles snaked above the water and then slapped down hard, striking its paddle-shaped end against the surface in emphatic - what?

"Sir," Ron whispered to the Headmaster, "how come Hagrid talks to the squid as if it was sensible, and to his own brother as if he was a - you know. A moron, or a little kid."

"Believe it or not," Dumbledore murmured back, "Grawp _is_ a 'little kid'. You may have noticed that Hagrid himself is - emotionally somewhat younger than his chronological age, and true giants age very slowly. I understand that Grawp is in his twenties - but in terms of development he is the equivalent of a child of five or six."

The squid flared abruptly into violent zigzags of black and white, rearing up and spreading its tentacles to show the sharp beak at the centre.

Hagrid nodded. "Yeh're right," he said soberly. "'S terrible to think - our own students..."

"What did he say?" Hermione asked sharply. "Hagrid, what did he say?"

"Th' two girls - vicious little bitches - they were under current wards. An' tha' means - "

"It means that they are still here," Dumbledore said grimly. "Somewhere in this castle."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The too-vivid recollection of agony and terror rose up like nausea, choking him and sending successive waves of fever and chill shivering over his skin. Severus clung to her, trying not to whimper or vomit as the jolting shudders gradually grew further apart and the remembered horrors receded. There was no meticulously detailed tormentor here to take him apart one shrieking nerve at a time: only Hermione's slim, firm arms to hold him; a steadying presence which showed no sign of dissolving away into one of the Dark Lord's jeering phantasms.

When his heart had slowed to something which felt less like hail hammering on a tin roof, he let go of her and turned his face towards the mattress with a muttered profanity. The confirmation that two of his tormentors were somewhere nearby - girls who had watched him being abased and had enjoyed seeing it - had shaken him more than he wanted to admit and left him dizzy with fear and shame, lost somewhere in a maze of darkness. When Hermione placed the palm of her hand against his chest, anchoring him, it felt like a buoyancy ring thrown to a drowning man. He put his own much larger hand over hers and gave it a little squeeze, running his thumb across the fine skin and pressing her palm flat above his racing heart. After a few deep, shuddering breaths, he uncurled enough to look at her again.

"I... wish this weren't necessary," he said painfully. "Not that I don't wish you were here, but... that I could do without it, that I weren't so pitifully fucking needy and needing someone to be with me and hold me at every bloody moment."

"It's all right... no, it really is." She propped herself up on one elbow, looking down at him affectionately. "It's comforting for me too, you know, to have someone to hold. For all of us, I think. It's... not easy, to admit you need a cuddle, sometimes, when the world is scary and overwhelming. Especially, say, for Professor McGonagall or Professor Dumbledore. Or the resident Gryffindor Brain who has to hold things together lest The Boy Who Lived on His Fraying Nerves just snaps and goes off like a frog in a sock. Again."

"He does tend to, doesn't he?" He frowned up at her, dourly amused. "Out of all the career-options which I may at some point have considered, I have to say that 'Live Teddy-Bear' or 'Sentient Comfort-Blanket' weren't included - though I do know that many women think that the main purpose of a man is to have something to warm their feet on." He sighed and rolled over onto his back with his arm behind his head and lay staring up at the ceiling, the line of his nose like a hard blade against the backdrop of the tapestried room. "I suppose it's true, actually... 'Live Teddy-Bear' was part of my job-description as House Master - you wouldn't think Slytherins would go in for cuddles but they're a nervy bunch - and it's nice to know that I can still be of service." Had it been one of his own - a child he had tried to comfort when she cried for home - who had laughed to see McLaggen kicking him in his helpless agony? "And - thank you for trying to make me feel less like a... a _client_. It's nearly almost working."

Hermione leaned down and kissed him, very briefly, before pulling away and blushing a bit. Her heart was doing gymnastics, and she sternly tried to squelch it. "Believe me, I'm grateful for any moment I can spend with you," she said softly. "And although I'm fairly sure the others aren't glad for the same reason, I know they find it comforting too. We didn't have to make a schedule because we lacked volunteers to stay with you... we made it so Professor McGonagall wouldn't continue keeping you all to herself, and depriving herself of sleep and meals in the meantime... she wouldn't have left you, if she had a choice, except to actually teach classes. And that time, Professor Dumbledore wanted to keep for _him_self."

"If I were being cynical I would say that Albus and Minerva are just assuaging their own guilty consciences - but oddly enough it doesn't feel like that. Minerva in particular behaves as if she really... And, um, it almost sounds as though the rest of you - I mean, not just you yourself but Longbottom, Lovegood, all of you - actively wanted to spend time with me, not just to prevent poor Minerva from exhausting herself...? Improbable as that may be."

"Professor McGonagall loves you," she said seriously. "You didn't see her, when you were first brought in... she looked as if her heart had been ripped out and stepped on. And when you finally said her name, and recognized her... she cried for hours, she was so happy, and we practically had to pry her arms off you to make her go and eat something." She settled on her back beside him, resting her head lightly against his shoulder, and looked up at the dark ceiling. "There's no knowing why Luna does things, most of the time, but she does seem to like you. And Neville... he worried so much about you, Trevor had to run away twice as much as usual just to get his attention."

"He brings the blasted thing to bed with him, did you know? A frog in a sock is nothing, believe me, compared with a toad in a nightshirt. And Lovegood - mostly I think she just likes having a captive audience. Not that I'm complaining, especially when I think where I - "

He turned his head to look at her, huffing gently to get the strands of brown hair out of his face. "Albus, Minerva - the odd thing is, when I was a child and it was their job to care for me, neither of them lifted a finger to help me, that I remember. Black's attempt to murder me wasn't even a crime to them; Minerva I will say was at least very angry, but even she seemed to be angry because of the, the irresponsibility of it, rather than out of any interest in my pathetic life. Yet now that I am a grown man, injured in the course of my duties, they act as if... Well, as I imagine parents would act. If they cared about one."

"Didn't yours, then?" she asked softly.

He snorted. "My father's main interaction with me consisted in hitting me - with his fists or with an implement - and telling me how worthless I was. My mother - she wasn't a _bad_ woman, precisely, but she just wasn't equipped by nature to care for anything more demanding than a geranium. And even then she'd probably over-water it." His childhood had been, both in retrospect and at the time, deeply unsatisfactory and depressing; but it occurred to him that this slow, piecemeal recovery from total helplessness was rather like reliving early childhood - only this time, with a family who wouldn't hit him if he cried or wet himself.

He smiled at her, fleetingly. "This whole situation is all so - odd. I feel myself to be - ruined, broken, a tower fallen, and I would have expected my life to follow suit: but now that I have time on my hands - on my hand - somehow and against all probability I seem to have acquired a social life. Suddenly Albus and Minerva seem to have appointed themselves as my surrogate parents, which is deeply unnerving, and Longbottom has decided he wants to be my son which is even more so. And an attractive and dazzlingly intelligent young woman half my age wants to be my lover." He gave her what he hoped was a winning smile, although he was aware that he probably wasn't very good at it. "Kiss me again?"

She did so, pushing back her hair as it fell around her face and his, kissing him slowly and gently until her heart pounded and her breathing was decidedly unsteady, as he turned into her embrace and slipped his hand behind her shoulders to draw her closer. "I can't even imagine, really, what that would be like," she said softly. "My parents... they've always loved me, and done the best they could for me. They're perfectionists, mind you, and sometimes that made things difficult... but once I learned to be one too, we got along perfectly."

She thought about it, kissing him again as she did so. "As for Professor Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall... I really don't know them well enough to explain that. But they've been seeming... tired, lately. And they're showing things more than they used to... temper, and being unhappy, and that sort of thing. Maybe this was just too much for them to face."

She gave in to a long-cherished daydream, then, and gently kissed the bridge of his hooked nose. For all he'd lost, she was deeply grateful that his nose had been spared. "And I do love you," she whispered. "I want... to be with you, in any way I can. It's... a humbling feeling. If you were mobile, I have a horrible feeling that I'd be following you around like a puppy, just in case you tried to vanish again, which would look terribly silly."

"In your school robes? We would look like Batman and Robin - or a pair of very peculiar nuns - but this is another 'habit' I could easily get into," and he pulled her against him and rolled over to kiss her more deeply and with some force. As her lips parted under his, he felt the tip of her tongue flick against his lips. His heart thumped for an instant in fright before he mastered himself and tentatively pressed back. As his tongue slid against hers, he felt an answering pulse of desire rather further south, a sudden intense awareness of his own gender, and considered being afraid again; but the moment was slow and golden like honey and it was possible, held in Hermione's peaceful affection, to enjoy the sensation and even court it, instead of shying away from it.

When they had both got their breath back a little, he laid his long hand against the side of her face and smiled wryly. "At this point I really ought to be - propped up on one elbow, looming over you and smouldering suitably - but with only one hand available I feel I should use it for something more... _active_" he murmured, running his thumb lightly along her lips. "I wish Filius would get a move on with adjusting the prosthetics so I can really feel with them - it really can't come soon enough."

"Mnuh," Hermione said vaguely, her brain having shut down more or less completely during that prolonged, intense kiss. She cupped his face between her hands, allowing herself a moment of blissful appreciation before her mind started working again to process what he'd actually said. "It is... entirely unfair to kiss me like that and then expect me to be able to talk," she said, blushing a bit. "And perhaps you should tell him you need legs in order to properly get your leg over, that might hurry him up." She kissed him again. "And... I can't believe you even know Batman and Robin exist. How on earth did you find out about them?"

"Promise you won't tell...?" he began, and then pulled a wry face. "I suppose it hardly matters now - it's not as if I have any - public dignity left in any case. My dark secret. One of my dark secrets. I'm three-parts Muggle. I grew up in this - grim little mill-town a bit south of Manchester. We didn't have a telly ourselves - we were far too poor - but my auntie was comfortably-off by local standards and she had one. She even had an indoor lavatory!"

"I won't breathe a word," she promised, snuggling up to him. "Although it does explain why... well." She made a wry face. "Why you never acted as if I were a... contaminant, I suppose. I know the whole Mudblood thing is foolish, but... it still hurt. Especially when it was little first years actually fleeing from me, not just Draco being a prat. I was used to him, but to see the... the _revulsion_ on the face of some little eleven-year-old who thought I was one step up from a troll..."

"It's because they're afraid of us - we're afraid of them - shit, I don't know which way I'm facing any more. The history books make a joke out of the witch-persecutions, they make it sound as if it was a big joke and no true witch or wizard ever really suffered but it wasn't _like_ that. It's all very well to let off a few hexes but against people with crossbows, or guns - and once he's lost his wand, a wizard is nearly as helpless as the next man. Thousands were tortured and then burned alive or garrotted and every wizarding child knows it, they whisper about it behind the broom-shed - and there are so many of them. Us. The wizarding world is so tiny, so fragile - we swank about with our wands and boast about how powerful we are but Muggles don't need to be individually powerful when they outnumber us more than six thousand to one.

"The old pure-blood families, the ones who talk about Mudbloods and mean it, they're terrified that allowing Muggle-borns into wizarding society means that the Muggles will find out about us and either destroy us or put us in cages and use us as slave-weapons, because that's what they'd do. Except for Arthur Weasley, who thinks the Muggles would pat us on the head and study us and find us quaint, because that's what _he_'d do." He drew a deep breath; it was painful to think about his godson, not knowing where he was or what might be happening to him. "As for Draco, if you ever see him don't ever tell him I said this, but I suspect he rather fancies you and it unnerves him. If the pair of you were much younger, he'd pull your pigtails and run away."

Hermione nodded. "I've always thought... most non-Slytherins seem content to write Slytherin off as a simple bigot, who didn't think Muggle-borns were good enough," she said slowly. "But... I assume you went to a Muggle school, and actually got taught a little history, instead of the over-simplified, wizards-are-the-coolest drivel we get from Binns. I did, and I know a lot more about history than most of the students here. In Slytherin's time... There may have been an element of bigotry, but I think he did have a point. When there are so very many of The Other, and so very few of you, and you _know_ they want to kill you... welcoming in the children of The Other and sharing all your secrets is beyond stupid. Some of them are going to be spies, it's a given, and he decided that rescuing the magical children of Muggles was less important than preserving the safety of the wizards they already had.

"I'm not sure he was entirely right, given the basic inadequacy of the pure-blood breeding population, but I can see his point. Which doesn't make me any happier about making a first-year cry just by trying to help her up." She made an impatient noise. "It's one of the really frustrating things about wizards. They hate change so much, that even when there's no longer any real reason to fear Muggle-borns - who would we spy for? Who could we TELL, who would believe us? - I'm still about as welcome as Norbert." She paused. "Er... Hagrid tried to raise a baby dragon in his hut once. He named it Norbert. Draco probably told you about it - it was the only time, I think, where he actually got into not-completely-deserved trouble for something WE did, instead of the other way around."

"I don't think there was much going on in the way of witch-hunts in Salazar's time - this was during the reign of Amlaib mac Iduilb, remember, in the nine-seventies - but it was certainly a time of great religious and political turmoil. The risk, as I understand it, was not so much of being burnt at the stake as of being forced to take sides in the Danish wars of succession - and finding oneself on the losing side. Plus there was, and indeed still is, some debate about whether it is - _moral_ to take Muggle children out of their natural environment, when that might not really be what they or their parents want. This was far more of an issue at a time when Apparition was still in its infancy and there were no fast Muggle means of transport: Salazar felt that it was moot whether Hogwarts was rescuing Muggle-born wizards, or kidnapping them." He pulled a wry face. "And you don't think that the - the CEA, or My6, would take an interest in wizard powers, if they found out about us? I know for a fact that North Korea already does."

"I don't think they'd believe in wizard powers. Certainly not if some eleven or twelve year old came running up to them and said 'Hey, guess what, I can do magic!'. Muggles are so thoroughly trained to believe that magic doesn't exist that many of them actually can't see it even when it's done right in front of them. They just don't let themselves." She paused, as something rather belatedly sank in. "Uhm. Did you just say earlier that you thought Draco might fancy me a bit?"

"I'd put money on it. After all, all Malfoys are expected to have excellent taste..."

Hermione turned that over in her mind. "Good heavens," she said slowly. "I had no idea... I mean, I always thought he loathed me. If I'd known that, I probably would have been nicer to him... or possibly punched him a bit harder, since he really was an utter arsehole to me most of the time. He never hit me back, though, or hexed me directly... I always thought that was some sort of old-fashioned not-hitting-girls thing."

"Oh, yes - but that sort of 'putting girls on a pedestal' idealization just makes it easier to lust after them from afar. Trust me."

"Wow." She smiled a little. "I... am very flattered, actually. I never thought I'd be _anything-ed_ from afar. It would probably have gotten us both lynched by our respective houses if we'd ever actually got involved, but it's still nice to know that someone might think of me that way." She paused. "Of course, you aren't necessarily an improvement in the 'being lynched' stakes. But you're worth it."

"Thank you" he said gravely. "You think that the sainted House of Gryffindor would still disapprove of your doing this" - and he pulled her close and kissed her open-mouthed and at deep, slow leisure, until the blood pounded in his ears, and elsewhere - "with the Greasy Git," he finished triumphantly and rather breathlessly, "even now that I'm officially a _bona fide_ martyred hero?"

Hermione was gasping a bit herself, and she retaliated with a long, lingering kiss of her own. "Mmm... no, of course not, that would require them to change their minds about you and all Gryffindors are prone to getting set in stone about things. I may have to fight for your honour a few times. You may have to give me a scarf or a ribbon in Slytherin colours to tie around my arm as a sign of your favour..."

"And so you're going to ride into the lists for me, wearing my favour? That would be - actually, seriously, that would be... almost overwhelming. Apart from Albus, nobody ever really... God. Having someone to fight for me. A real ally. God." And she would do it, that was the amazing thing but he could see it in the determined set of her fine-boned jaw: she would defy her housemates for him, as Lily in the end had not, and he thought that he might declare his allegiance to the Muggle-born Gryffindor chit in front of all Slytherin and hang the consequences, as his schoolboy self, in the end, had not. "But you have to promise to let me do the same for you, when I am - if and when Filius manages to make me a set of prostheses I can reliably stand on without falling on my arse. And if you kiss me like that again, I am seriously going to need ten minutes on my own."

She giggled, and snuggled against him. "I like that idea too," she murmured, resting her forehead against his. "I'll go into battle against the Gryffindors for you, with green and silver ribbons in my hair, and you can fight the Slytherins for me... I'll find a nice red scarf for you to wear. Or maybe a tasteful little red heart to pin to your sleeve. The Hufflepuffs will just be glad we're neither of us yelling so much, of course, and the Ravenclaws will understand the attraction of intellect, but Gryffindor and Slytherin..." She wrinkled her nose. "Still. I love you, and I will fight for you, be it against our enemies or merely against the stupid masses."

"I can think of two stupid masses you'll need to convince, straight away. Potter has been making a serious attempt to be polite since I was - injured, but I doubt that his new-found tolerance will extend as far as my becoming, um, _involved_ with one of his best friends. And not a scarf - with my pallor, if I wear red next to my face it will reflect off my skin and make me look apoplectic. Wearing my heart on my sleeve might be a little - kitsch. But a cummerbund would be nice - a good dark red, not too tomato-ish - and we'll tie up your hair with a green bow."

"We could always put a bow in your hair too," she pointed out. "It's long enough to tie back, now, and a nice cherry red would go well with the black. But yes, a green bow in my hair would work well... Slytherin, taming the untameable. In more ways than one." She made a face. "Harry and Ron are going to have fits, aren't they? Don't worry, I'll set Neville to guard your door... they could no more attack him than they could eat a kitten. And besides, if they so much as speak sternly to you and upset you, Professor McGonagall will murder them." She paused, and grinned suddenly. "Of course, should you wish to, you could always let them burst in, throw a tantrum and call them all sorts of nasty names, then summon Professor McGonagall and tattle on them. I'm sure you'd enjoy seeing them whimper. And I would most decidedly side with you, if they did something so asinine, just so you know."

"That might be fun, actually. I haven't had a chance to shout at anybody much except Adrian and Poppy for - well, since - and they don't react properly. It's very frustrating. But would tying my hair back be a good idea? Surely it would just make my nose look even bigger."

"Oh, no... quite the opposite." She kissed the tip of said nose affectionately. "I'm very fond of your nose, by the way. Caesar himself would not have scorned such a nose. But having your hair hanging down flat like that just makes it look bigger... the straight lines make your face look flatter and thinner, which just emphasizes your nose. If you pulled it back, your cheekbones and jaw would balance it out better... your face would be all angles, instead of just the nose sticking out all by itself."

"I suppose so - I've never really seen myself in profile. I try not to see myself at all, if truth be told. I'll feel - naked" he said, with a visible flinch, "if I don't have my hair to hide behind."

"Then you needn't tie it back, if you don't want to," she said softly, resting her forehead lightly against his. "But I'd like to see it that way sometime, even if it's just the two of us. You seem to be under the impression that you're some sort of gargoyle, Severus, and it isn't true... you're no Gilderoy Lockhart, I admit, but you're very striking... and you have beautiful eyes, when you're not glaring." Perhaps she should have said this before, but they were both touchy about appearances, and rarely discussed them. "You make my knees go all wobbly when you smile, even with the scars, and they make your smouldering even more impressive. And while I'd like to keep the knee-wobbling all to myself, I think I could live with inspiring desperate envy in a large percentage of the school's female population."

"How very - Slytherin of you." He kissed her lightly, a mere touch. "If it would give you that much pleasure to show me off I suppose I should endeavour to be more - show-offable. If there is such a word. I shall certainly enjoy making all the boys equally envious."

She blushed. "I wish you could," she said wistfully. "I'm not... most boys don't... notice me, that way. Ginny says it's because I'm intimidating. Being kind of flat-chested doesn't help much, either, especially in those all-concealing school robes." The temptation to use magic to remedy _that_ problem had been almost irresistible... but it was far too easy for it to go wrong, and she did NOT want to wind up a bigger joke than Eloise Midgeon.

"But yes, it would give me great pleasure to show you off, although I may well get lynched by a horde of jealous schoolgirls who don't see why it couldn't have been THEM who finally got you." She touched his cheek gently. "I am... immensely proud of being with you," she told him, because the daft lump actually didn't seem to know. "God knows I'm no beauty, and I'm not exactly sought after... but nevertheless, I've managed to secure your affections. Once it's common knowledge, I'm going to inspire both shock and envy, and I am going to enjoy every minute of it."

"Promise me you won't slap me?"

"Erm - OK" she said warily, wondering what was coming.

"You have to say it."

"All right - I promise I won't slap you. Satisfied?"

"Moderately. You may not be exactly, er, classically beautiful, but you are exceedingly - cute." As he said it he ducked slightly, as if he thought she really might hit him. "And a lot of men find 'cute' a lot more appealing than - well, there's a difference between what you might want to see in an oil-painting on the wall and what you might want to see, um, lying next to you on the pillow after a long day. But boys - teenage boys are scared to approach a girl they feel may be - out of their league. If you weren't so - alarmingly competent and clever, I promise you you'd have half the adolescent males in Hogwarts salivating after you."

Hermione blushed furiously. "I... er... thank you..." she managed. If he was lying, she appreciated it, but it didn't sound like he was. "I... cute? Really?" She could not only live with cute, she would be more than grateful for it.

"Oh yes. Really. Even the, um, the teeth, before you corrected them, just made you look even more like a little - like something all bright-eyed and fluffy that people like to stroke, like a squirrel or a pet rabbit." He refused point-blank to be caught saying the word "bunny."

"Pansy Parkinson used to call me a chipmunk. They are sort of cute, actually... You don't look at all cute, of course...much more like an eagle than a rabbit. Much handsomer and more dignified."

"Then I'll try not to swoop down and carry you off in my claws - unless you want me to, of course."

"I kind of like it when you swoop, actually. And it would definitely add to the envy if I was getting my own personal swooping... not that I'm usually one for public displays, but a small and dignified one might be nice."

"In which case, I promise to pounce in public occasionally, wearing my most bat-like cape, and carry you off to my lair in front of all the twittering little fourth-years... When I am well enough, of course, and you have finished school, or are decently close to doing so." He lifted his chin in a wry, self-mocking gesture. "I slightly hate to admit this, but when I think about it it was probably watching Batman and Robin when I was eight which gave me a lifelong tropism for dramatic cloaks."

Hermione laughed and kissed him. "Well, good. I like you in them... and I quite like the thought of being pounced on and carried off to your lair... not, you understand, that that's the only way to get me there. A discreet note passed in the halls would also do the trick... and I don't know about you, but I've always rather _wanted_ to pass a few discreet notes. I've never had anyone to pass them with before."

"Oh, Lord, neither have I. At least - people used to pass notes to _me_, sometimes, but they were - well, threats. Insults." For a moment his eyes went blank and he shivered slightly, remembering years of cold, dragging isolation and unhappiness. "So you've never passed notes with the other two legs of the tripod? And - I do see what you mean, about being able to talk freely. Apart from Pomona, there's probably nobody in the staff room who wouldn't have balked at 'tropism'."

She gave him an amused look. "Given that they regard reading as something I do for them so they don't have to, what would the point be of passing them notes? They'd just ask me to read it to them and explain the long words." She leaned over to kiss him gently, wanting to make the unhappy expression go away, at least for now. "And I don't actually think I've ever passed a note in school. Whispered a fair bit, but no notes as such. Certainly nothing sentimental that it would embarrass me terribly for anyone but the recipient to read... and according to my research, it's absolutely essential to the overall schoolgirl experience to do so. Of course, technically it needn't be a note passed to a dangerously sexy teacher, but that's certainly a valid variant on the theme."

"Exactly how sentimental are you proposing to get, on a scale of one to ten? I warn you, I won't be held responsible for my own actions if you start addressing me as 'Bunnikins' or anything of that kind, like the regrettable Miss Brown. Although I suppose I've just given a hostage to fortune by telling you so, haven't I?"

"You mean you don't want to be referred to as 'my own snugglebear' or something equally nauseating?" Hermione assumed an unconvincing disappointed expression. "Oh, dear, and I was so hoping we'd express our affection with silly pet-names! I suppose I'll just have to stick to more adult sentiment. You know... suggestions for when to meet next, expressions of profound respect and regard, fragments of poetry... and don't you dare laugh, but yes, I have tried to write some. It's not terribly good, but at the time I was nurturing a hopeless passion."

"And might I enquire as to the object of that - hopeless passion?" he asked rather warily. Maybe he would be lucky and it would be Krum... But no. He knew with rather a sinking feeling that it would be, had been him. Which was all very flattering, but if it turned out to be painfully bad he knew that he was no good at all at paying insincere compliments convincingly. Hell, he couldn't even pay _sincere_ ones convincingly. It was too much to hope for that she would turn out to have real poetic ability.

Hermione blushed harder. "You, actually. I was terribly worried and unhappy at the time... I was desperately in love with you, and you were still suffering so much... believe me, I know it's at best an indifferent attempt at the sonnet form, but I've always liked it... my parents both adore Shakespeare, that's why they chose 'Hermione' for me."

"A sonnet" he said carefully. "I suppose that it was - predictable that you would elect to attempt something... academically formal." But it let him off the hook, to some extent: he should be able to comment intelligently on the form without causing offence, whether or not he found the content embarrassing. "Do you wish to read it to me?"

"Oh, er, I - couldn't possibly. Say it to you, I mean." She dropped her eyes. "I could write it down" she said very quietly, apparently addressing the floor.

"I generally find poetry is easier to absorb when one sees it - written down" he agreed, with an encouraging nod. He lay back and watched her as she slipped quietly off the bed and padded across the room to the desk, where she lit a candle and then sat absent-mindedly nibbling the end of a swan-feather quill as she consulted her own memory. "That's not a Sugarquill, you know," he said in some amusement, and she started and looked guilty.

When she had finished, and had brought him the completed parchment, she helped him up silently and he sat and blinked at the still slightly damp ink, realizing, not for the first time, that he was soon going to have to swallow whatever shreds of vanity he might have left and start wearing glasses.

"Thou didst wear distance like a cloak, a shield  
against the admiration thou deserve,  
and cruel and rapier wit did often wield,  
thy solitude and myst'ry to preserve;  
And for that, now 'tis all the worse to see  
thy wit and courage useless now to fend  
the hurt upon hurt visited on thee,  
and I would give my all thy hurts to mend.  
To hear disdain drip from thy tongue again,  
to be unneeded; and to see you whole  
would bring joy greater than the selfish pain,  
of loss; better my heart break than thy soul.  
And bitt'rest scorn would seeming sweetness be,  
if thy heart were whole, though free of me."

"Hmm" he said noncommittally, checking the rhyming scheme to see whether it was a Shakespearean or a Petrarchan sonnet. "Modern writing in the Shakespearean mode is perhaps always in danger of appearing to be a little... flowery. But it - captures a particular emotion admirably" he added, clearing his throat. Indeed, on second reading the words "hurt upon hurt" made him clench his grip on the parchment until his knuckles whitened. "Would you really have been happy to have me be - horrible to you, if it meant that I was getting better?"

"Oh, yes," she said softly. "I probably would have annoyed you immensely by beaming delightedly at you whenever you said something nasty. It still would have hurt, all the more because I love you so much, but knowing that you were well enough to be able to be nasty would have made it more than worth it." She'd never showed one of her few attempts at poetry to anyone. He hadn't thought it was actually dreadful. From him, that was high praise.

"I suppose, if Albus was seriously injured I'd be pleased to find him well enough to twinkle knowingly at me - even though under ordinary circumstances it makes me want to punch him. And I suppose... truth to tell, I suppose I'm _not_ well enough to be nasty to people yet. I still feel disgustingly grateful to everybody. But no doubt it will wear off, in time." Hermione gave an odd little snort at that, not sure whether to be saddened or amused. Snape looked at her, his face softening. "I never had anybody write poetry about me before," he said, in a bright, slightly mocking voice, trying not to show how sentimental he was feeling. "Well - not unless you count James Bloody Potter, and you can imagine what _that_ was like."

Hermione smiled at him shyly. "I'll probably do it more often," she admitted. "If it's awful I won't show it to you, but there are times when if I don't get how I feel about you out somehow, I'll burst. And... thank you. For not laughing."

"If you had been writing sentimental poetry about the Red Moron I probably _would_ have laughed" he said lightly, "but to laugh at sentimental poetry about oneself would be both hurtful and ungrateful, especially as it was... especially as the sentiments expressed do you such credit. But... is that what it was _for_, to express how you felt about me?"

"It was... painful," she admitted. "Seeing you in so much pain, and not being able to help, and loving you so much and being sure you could never want me... which still surprises me, sometimes, waking up and remembering that you, in fact, do, at least provisionally. Writing the sonnet helped - taking those formless, overwhelming feelings and forcing them into rhyme and metre, nailing them down with words and... and turning them into something I could at least partially control. It wasn't easy to write, and it made me cry when I read it over, but... it did help."

"I understand. Turn something into writing, or formal speech, and you to some extent gain control over it. I always... It was painful, agonizingly painful, sometimes, having to report to Albus after a Death Eater meeting, telling what I had done, or had seen done, or had had done to me, but once I had put it into words and had - nailed it down like that, it didn't make me feel quite so - deranged. But a true writer, as I understand it, is more cold-blooded - a true writer is so in love with their art that they can look on the terrible event and even as it tears them part of them thinks 'I can use this.' And I do understand that too, because I can be a bit... Not with words, but - "

He lay down flat on the bed again with his head back, and shut his eyes. "When I was - there, and they took a knife and hacked what was left of my left arm off at the elbow, and I was - shrieking, vomiting, mindless with pain and they forced me to open my eyes and watch while Fenrir Greyback devoured my own flesh - " He stopped, hearing her make a sick sound in the back of her throat, and opened his eyes again and looked at her. "I'm sorry," he said steadily. "But for me too, sometimes - nailing it down in words is - necessary. Essential, even."

She nodded wordlessly, looking rather pale and green about the gills, and he smiled dryly back. "Anyway, the point is - I watched my own flesh and bone going down that - that thing's throat and all I could think, insofar as I could still think at all, was '_Damn_, what a waste - think of the potion I could make, with fresh human bone and an actual, genuine Dark Mark.' It would have been highly illegal but, God, I could have cursed Riddle from here to Pluto with it - especially with it being my own bone. The _power_ in that..." he said wistfully. "What a bloody waste of opportunity."

Hermione nodded, reaching out to smooth his hair back gently. "It's... not pleasant to hear," she admitted. "But if you do need to talk about it, I will always listen. I don't want you to feel as though you have to keep on facing things alone, just because it might be... upsetting... to hear it. I'd rather know, and have it help you, than be happily ignorant and have you suffer. As I said... I would give my all, to have you well." She leaned over to kiss his forehead. "And at least they didn't let him bite it off himself. I'm fairly sure I'm up to Wolfsbane, I know the theory at least, but you've got enough to cope with as it is." It could always be worse... even now, when it was almost as much worse as worse could be.

"Fortunately - or perhaps unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint - even Pettigrew wasn't stupid enough to risk having me come right back up at them frothing and biting and sprouting fur. God - it would have added a whole new dimension to being made to - to - in my mouth, wouldn't it?" He sounded genuinely, wryly amused, even if his amusement had an edge of hysteria to it. "One bite, and..."

"It certainly would have been tempting to let your teeth slip just a little, wouldn't it? Especially since, without you, I doubt they'd have access to anyone who could brew the Wolfsbane..."

"I could have had almost the whole bloody lot of them literally baying at the moon - from which you may gather that almost the whole bloody lot of them - " He shut his eyes and pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth, swallowing down nausea, then sighed gustily and lay looking up at her where she sat on the edge of the bed, watching him in gentle concern. "Wasted opportunities. That's one of the - one of the things that makes talking to you so - The others, if I mention the, the sexual aspects of what happened to me, they - well, I know enough to know now that they won't recoil or be disgusted by me, even though part of me still thinks they should be, but it makes them especially sympathetic and, and kind in that sort of - hushed way. Well, except for Lovegood," he added honestly, "but she's off in a little mental _cul-de-sac_ all her own. Being treated as if I was made of glass, it's much better than being despised for it, but it still makes me feel - lessened. Whereas you - your concern is even-handed, you don't react any differently over me being mutilated or being made to - " He pressed his wrist against his teeth again, unable to make himself name the thing but knowing that she would understand.

Hermione nodded. "It's all... horrible, to think of you suffering either way, but I would never give you the spun-glass treatment," she promised. "I can't imagine doing it, actually. You know how I see you." The broken sword, shattered into pieces but still bright and sharp and shining. "And I'm a Muggle-born, of course, which I think makes more of a difference than the wizard-born realize. Things like that are more... acknowledged, among Muggles. It comes as less of a horrible shock, you know?"

He nodded and pulled a wry face. "We - or do I mean _they_? - are accustomed to being able to put everything right with a wave of a bloody wand, they - we - don't know how to cope with the sort of damage which takes years to put right, or which can never be, so we either sweep it away under the carpet - which is to say, into St Mungo's - or tiptoe around it. And I _hate_ being tiptoed around - I'm spoiling for a good fight, by now, but nobody will bloody give me one. And it wouldn't be fair to shout at you just for the fun of it - not after - even if you would think it was a good sign. Which reminds me - "

Still lying flat on his back, he picked up Hermione's parchment from where it lay discarded on the bedspread and held it up above him. "I thought so," he said. "There seems to be a syllable short on that last line. Shouldn't that be 'if but thy heart' - or did you leave it short deliberately, for effect?"

She blushed. "Is there? I rewrote that line so many times that I think I lost count. It's not easy to count syllables on your fingers and weep brokenheartedly at the same time. Which I did. Crookshanks was most unhappy with how soggy I kept making him... we were all being very careful not to let anyone else see us get teary over you, especially not you, because it would upset you even more, but cats are different."

He looked at her curiously, half cocking an eyebrow. "_All_ implying at least three - apart from yourself and Minerva, roughly how many people were actively in tears over my broken body, would you say?"

"Well, besides us... Mrs Weasley was in floods, of course. I'm pretty certain Ginny did, but she hides, so I can't be absolutely sure. Professor Dumbledore did. Madam Pomfrey - floods again. Tonks did, according to Ginny. I wouldn't say Professor Flitwick was actually weeping, but I saw him tear up a few times. Madam Hooch got all raspy, the one time she was allowed to visit, so she might have later. And you'd have had whole battalions of Slytherins weeping over your shattered body if they'd had the knowledge or opportunity therefore. It's been all green scarves and red eyes with some of them ever since you've been gone."

"Good Lord." He felt slightly choked up himself at the thought, truth to tell. "I gather Albus allowed MacRichard and the rest to think that what they had found was my mouldering corpse, mutilated after death, and didn't tell my Slytherins or, or any other students outside of Potter's immediate circle that I was still alive and on school premises until you were sure I was going to live and be... well, at least sane enough to recognize my surroundings and not actually scream and go into convulsions if anybody came near me. That was - that was sensible. If I was going to die, and they couldn't even say goodbye to me without hurting me further, there was no point in putting my House through the, the grief of knowing that I had been mutilated while alive and was still suffering, and of hoping for me to live and losing me anyway. If they - if they really do feel like that about me."

"Oh, they do... and it would have been cruel to you and to them, if we'd told them right away. They'd been mourning for you for months - to give you back, dreadfully hurt, and then immediately take you away again would have been a horrible thing to do." Hermione sighed. "I never realized how much they depend on you. A lot of the teachers _do_ have an anti-Slytherin bias, as much as I hate to admit it. And the ones who don't... like Madam Hooch and Professor Vector... really aren't very comforting."

"I do try to be comforting, but I fear it isn't my _forté_. But sometimes just knowing that you have an adult who's on your side and will listen to you is an enormous help, at that age. Even if it's a, a sour, stiff bastard who looks as if he's bitten a lemon, and can't think of anything more useful to do than to give you a peppermint and a clean hankie."

He looked down at his hand, frowning. "I know you all think I'm far too biased, and to an extent it's true. I've always been - immensely competitive: that's why I was Sorted into Slytherin in the first place. But when every man's hand is against my children, and only one man stands for them, I have to - to balance out all that hatred for them, and make them feel protected, and so by myself I have to be as much _for_ them as the hundreds who make up the rest of the school are against them. I only wish I could have done more to warn them against - against Him. At least I will be able to, now, and I shouldn't - I shouldn't whinge about my own pain, when it may enable me to save some of my children's lives."

Hermione's eyes stung at the sheer bloody selflessness of that last statement. "You are a wonderful man, do you know that?" she murmured, kissing him lingeringly. "Really. And if I can help at all, to help them, I will. Including terrorizing as many Gryffindors as possible into behaving like human beings instead of undertrained monkeys." She kissed him again, and he felt a nerve twitch all the way down to his groin. "You sell yourself short, you know, when you say you're not comforting... You protect them, you look out for them, you counter some of the unfairness of the world, you listen to them when they're upset and give them a peppermint instead of a lecture on how being Slytherins means they must deserve it. If that isn't comforting, I don't know what is."

"Thank you," he said seriously. "I'd like to think that I do comfort them, but it isn't easy when I have so little personal experience to base my behaviour on. But some of them have such appalling home-lives that just having an adult be steady and calm and not hit them or scream at them is a blessing. I just wish I could do more for them. It isn't only Slytherins who can have abusive or neglectful families, of course - poor little Longbottom is a case in point - but I do tend to get the worst of them. I'm sure the other Houses would say that that was because Slytherin children tend to have Slytherin parents, and all Slytherins are cruel bastards - but really it's because abused children tend to be so driven by the need to prove themselves, and the Sorting Hat interprets that as ambition. I suppose that's why we get the ugly ones, too - and I was both." He smiled at her teasingly. "And _being_ Slytherin, of course, I have a slight ulterior motive for appearing to be selfless and without ulterior motive - since it gets me kisses like that!"

She laughed, and kissed him again. "You may have as many as you like. And I've never understood that... that blind spot, in wizarding society, about not removing children from a home where they're actively in danger. The Muggle system is far from perfect, of course, but at least they try. Even when everyone knows, here, they don't _do_ anything. We should definitely do something about that."

She paused, and smiled at him. "And that sounds rather like a plan for When the War is Over," she said softly. "It's hard to imagine, isn't it? But I like having something to look forward to, and plan for. So the war... and Him... aren't so all-consuming. There's something beyond it."

"One of the few good things about being a - an invalid and a cripple is that The War is really not my problem, any more. I don't doubt that if and when I recover sufficiently Albus will put me to work in some capacity, but for now he tells me that I'm not to worry about anything except resting and getting better, and I'm going to try to take him at his word and enjoy the respite. As for the rest - the pure-blood families are so obsessed with bloodlines and heirs that they tend to regard children as property, as living assets rather than as people. But you and I, perhaps... maybe we could change the system. We'll have to think about that before the summer - but not now, I think. I'm too sleepy. It's amazing how much energy you can burn up, just from kissing - if you do it properly. And you have a wedding to go to, in the morning."

"That I do... although I'll miss you terribly while I'm gone." She drew him to her, resting her cheek against his hair. "Mmm... and I don't know how I'll ever get to sleep all alone. Without you or Crookshanks, a bed feels very empty these days."

"I'm not sure whether to feel flattered by that comparison or not. Poor Crookshanks - I feel I am depriving him horribly. Maybe you should bring him down here with you - Minerva will tell you, I quite like to have a cat on the bed."

* * *

**Author's note:**

One of our reviewers for the last chapter asked why Severus wasn't receiving formal treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The basic answer is that there is no treatment for it - or at least there wasn't in 1998. Now, in 2006, there are drugs starting to come on the market which supposedly reduce the incidence of flashbacks, but at the time we're writing about, there was nothing to do for PTSD except take anti-depressants for the worst crises - which Severus has available in the form of Dreamless Sleep potion and Calming Draughts - and other than that, to talk it through with somebody sympathetic and sensible, and wait it out. Which he is doing.

Golden Wonder is a famous British brand of crisp (potato chips, to our American readers).

Squids have pigmented cells and complex little muscles in their skin which can be expanded and contracted to produce rapid changes in colour and texture. They really do use their skins as a canvas on which to write messages, expressed in visual patterns. The reason I chose to make the Hogwarts giant squid a male was because male squids use these built-in signal-flags more than females do.

Squid have a central beak surrounded by eight short tentacles which strictly speaking are known as "arms", and two very long tentacles known as "tentacles": but by dictionary definition and common usage they are _all_ tentacles, and I thought it would be too confusing to call the short ones arms. The arm-tentacles have a double row of suckers right along them on the inner side facing the beak. The tentacle-tentacles are smooth and round except for the ends, which are flattened, oval, and covered on one side with suckers rimmed with sharp teeth.

This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to comment on Snape's friendship with Lily and the harshness of his early relationship with Albus, and to reduce the amount of information which Albus had previously given him about the Horcruxes. In addition, Snape has been shown as feeling queasy when Adrian cuts himself: this was a detail which was simply forgotten about the first time round.


	16. 14 Enter the Dragon

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

**WARNING!**: seriously long chapter alert. There are whole _books_ out there shorter than this chapter. What can we say? They had a lot to talk about...

* * *

**14: ENTER THE DRAGON**

Snape looked at the clock again, fretfully. Surely, nothing bad could have happened? Albus had taken every precaution; there would be at least two Order members with Hermione at all times, pretending to be distant cousins, and she and her parents would be staying - had been staying - at a wizard-run hotel which, if it was in some ways an obvious target, was at least extremely heavily warded. It wasn't quite Unplottable - if it had been, guests would have had to be Obliviated of the address as they left - but it was the next best thing, and anybody staying there was invisible to any location spells cast outside its rather ugly Art Deco walls.

Surely, if anything bad _had_ happened to her, he would know? ((Was that why his heart had raced and hammered half the afternoon?)) Surely, if she had "met someone else", if two days in the company of the whole and unsullied had cured her of her curious attraction, he would know?

She had only been gone two and a half days, and here he was already retired to bed at seven o'clock on a Tuesday evening, feeling as dry and dislocated as if he had been lost in a desert. It was shaming to admit to himself that he had hoped that she would want to be with him, that she would hurry back sooner than this; embarrassing to be so dependent, to let what little sense of self he had left rest so heavily on one person: yet her continued interest in him was possibly the most flattering thing which had ever happened to him, and her steady good sense was an anchor in a rough sea.

Not that Lovegood wasn't also both reassuring and encouraging, in her own bizarre way. He watched her where she sat perched on the edge of the bed, her leg lying comfortingly against his, her expression earnest as she worked on an essay on lesser-known demonic forces for Alastor Moody (poor man), and he had no doubts of her whatsoever. It was profoundly disturbing to think that students he had taught, perhaps even Slytherins he had watched over and cared for, had hated him enough to jeer at him in his torment; but he had always associated Hogwarts students with being jeered at and tormented, one way or another - the really surprising thing was to find that there were two Gryffindors and a Ravenclaw of whose friendship and goodwill he was completely certain.

That was not even to mention the Slytherins who guarded his door - a reassuringly solid presence, and for a moment when he heard the murmur of voices outside in the corridor he thought nothing of it except that Albus had come early to take over from Lovegood - and indeed that was Albus's voice, muffled by the thickness of wood and stone but raised to - he grabbed for his wand as the voices outside escalated into sudden shouting and Lovegood slid from the bed, as fluid as water and as poised as a cat, and positioned herself between him and the door but standing, he noted with approval, slightly to the side, so as not to interfere with his own angle of fire.

Albus's voice again, hard, clear, insistent, and the door began to open and for one frozen, terrible moment he thought, seeing the white-blond head outlined against the light of the torches outside, that it was - but even as the hex started to flow automatically from will to wand he realized that Lucius was a tall man, and this was -

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Draco never knew how grateful he should have been, in that moment, that he had never quite attained his father's height or breadth of shoulder. He had left Dumbledore explaining to Pansy and Blaise that yes, Lucius Malfoy's son could be trusted, and slipped through the familiar door.

The room beyond was very different from the spare sitting-room he'd seen once or twice before. The walls were hung with tapestries, and everywhere was warmth and colour from the tinted glass shades around the candles to the glittering mobile hanging over the bed, which now held centre-stage, instead of being tucked into a side-room. Lovegood stood beside the bed, looking absurdly frail but with a martial glint in her eyes and her wand held ready to strike. And past her...

Draco stumbled, missing a step as the door swung to behind him and he took in the true extent of his godfather's injuries. He was even thinner than usual, and the blankets did not conceal the empty space where his legs should be. His left arm was gone as well, there were terrible scars on his face, and he looked petrified as he stared along his wand at Draco.

Draco had never seen Severus Snape look really afraid. The sight was almost more horrifying than the scars and the obvious weakness and illness. "I'm sorry," he whispered, freezing in place, not daring to approach the bed and its broken occupant any closer. "I should have waited. Uhm. Professor Dumbledore said it was all right for me to come in, but I can go away if it's a... a bad time."

Granger hadn't told him everything, not even close to it, he knew that now. But the tender concern in her usually shrill voice was a lot easier to understand now.

Snape, for his part, flopped back against the pillows, the room wheeling dizzily around him, and said the first thing which came into his shaken consciousness, which was "Shit!" The small irreducible part of himself which watched himself watching himself noted that this was not the most appropriate opening for a touching reunion with one's long-lost godson, but as the wand fell from his nerveless fingers he wasn't sure which prospect terrified him the most - that it really might have been Lucius standing there in that doorway, or that he had just come within a hair of smashing his godson into the wall with a magical force which, deprived of its release, was now burning and coiling through him like a towering electric storm, leaving him so sick and shaken he was barely aware of Lovegood retrieving his wand from the blankets and placing it firmly back on the bedside table within easy reach, her own wand still gripped tightly in her hand and her expression dour and untrusting.

He started to raise his hand, to stay Lovegood, to welcome Draco or to send him away, he wasn't sure, but his jaw refused to open, and the blue-white glow of St Elmo's Fire burned at his fingertips and left a tracery on the air.

"I don't think there is such a thing as a good time for this," Lovegood said, frowning at Draco. "He isn't well, you know."

"I know. I mean... I knew he wasn't well. I didn't know it was this... bad." Draco swallowed hard, suddenly glad that he'd emptied his stomach quite comprehensively while Granger gave him that incomplete outline of what his godfather had suffered. Otherwise he might have embarrassed himself now. "My father sent me away, almost as soon as they started. He told me you'd died." He found himself talking to Snape, almost pleading with him to understand. "I've been living under guard for months. He said you were dead, but he wouldn't let me see anyone or talk to anyone who wasn't a Death Eater. He wanted me to take the Mark, but I was - even though he promised me he hadn't let you suffer for long I was still - angry about you, I wasn't sure I wanted to be one of them any more. I wasn't sure I didn't, either, but he said if I went to Him with an impure will I'd be killed, so he was - keeping me where he and Walden and that lot could re-educate me, until I was ready."

"Did you believe him?" Lovegood said, with detached interest. "That Professor Snape was dead, I mean? I know he _nearly_ was, for a long time... I think he only weighed three stone, when they brought him in."

She stroked the tip of her wand past Snape's hand without touching him, drawing off the excess energy into a glimmering ball which hissed and crackled. When she had stripped out the worst of it he found he could speak again, his tongue unstuck itself from the roof of his mouth, although he was still trembling with shock. "Lucius is very... plausible, isn't he Draco?" he said quietly and, God, he didn't mean it to sound spiteful, he meant to defend the boy against Lovegood's implicit accusation, but somehow it came out viciously soft. "Just not very - merciful."

"It was all in the papers though, about you being alive and everything," the girl said. "Even the _Prophet_ got it nearly right."

"He didn't let me speak to anybody except his friends since - since October. Not even Mother. He s-said I was in danger."

Snape stared at the boy, standing there all green-faced and wan and miserable, and he wanted to be unreservedly glad of his safety, his survival, he wanted to welcome him with - well, whatever passed for open arms, these days, but the sight of him was dragging something hard and horrible up from the confused tangle of memory, half of him was here in this room looking at his stricken godson, and half of him was somewhere else, strung up like a side of meat, jerking and spasming in his chains and keening with pain as that same horrified face looked on and then turned to Lucius, shouting something, but the memory of his own screams kept him from hearing what it was as he struggled, shaking, to master his body's need to curl up into a whimpering foetal ball.

"I did believe it. We... had a bargain. I wouldn't shame him before them all by protesting if he made sure it ended quickly." Draco shivered, looking down at his hands. They looked very pale and feeble, all of a sudden. "He promised me. I should have known he was lying, I suppose."

Lovegood knelt beside Snape, murmuring something in a gentle, almost coaxing voice. Draco watched helplessly, with no idea what to do, trying not to wonder what could have roughened and hoarsened his godfather's silky, perfectly controlled voice like that. Damage to the throat, of course, but had it been some inflicted hurt or merely weeks and months of screaming that had torn it so badly? "She... Granger found me," he said, more to be saying something than anything else. "She said you wanted to know I was all right. That was when I found out you were still alive. She... she told me..." He trailed off, trying to master the childishly high pitch of his frightened voice. "Dumbledore looked in my head. I told him everything I know. He said it was all right to come down, that he trusted me..."

"Professor Dumbledore trusted Mr Crouch," Luna said calmly, "the one who wasn't Professor Moody; and Professor Lupin too, although Ginny said he didn't tell anyone about Mr Black being an Animagus. You didn't ask Mr Malfoy to try to save Professor Snape, instead of killing him?"

"Slytherin pragmatism," Snape said, hauling himself back from the depths and peripherally aware of, and grateful for, Lovegood's tact in not cuddling him in front of his godson. "There's no point asking for what you know you won't get, unless it's as a bargaining counter - and in this case, no point at all, because he would know Lucius would know that he knew that my freedom was something Lucius neither would nor could deliver. That's right, isn't it Draco?" As the boy opened his mouth to reply, Snape's brain abruptly caught up with his ears, and he pushed himself upright one-handed and said sharply, "You said that - Granger - found you? How did she find you? Was she injured at all?"

Draco couldn't argue with Lovegood on the subject of Dumbledore's judgement, since he was inclined to agree with her. "There was a bit of fighting, but she's all right. Nothing serious." Her leg had been bleeding a bit, but she'd been walking on it, so how serious could it have been? "We'd stopped at the hotel for something to eat, and she was there. I suppose she could tell I was a - sort of a prisoner." He took a deep breath. "And you're right. I knew that even if he wanted to, my father probably couldn't get you out. But I know that you used to be friends, and I thought he might be willing to risk killing you quickly so you wouldn't suffer any more. I thought... I thought that was the best I could hope for, with you in His hands. I knew I couldn't rescue you myself, my father was watching me too closely after I... I don't know if you remember, but I saw you once, soon after they captured you, and I couldn't pretend not to care, or to think that it was right. I'm sorry. I've never been much of an actor."

"Under the circumstances it's... probably to your credit that you are not." Unlike himself, whose survival as a spy had often depended on his ability to pretend to enjoy scenes and even actions which inwardly horrified him. "And yes, I do remember," he added quietly. "I thought that exposing you to such a scene was - disgraceful, even by Lucius's standards. And far from keeping his side of the bargain, he was only sorry that my condition deteriorated so fast that he was unable to keep me alive under torture until Christmas, as he had planned." As Draco sucked in his breath and paled even further Snape looked away, pretending nonchalance. "You say that - Miss Granger was involved in some form of fighting? You are certain that she is all right?"

"The others handled all the real fighting, I think: Granger just helped. I got Stunned a few minutes in, but there were some Aurors there who attacked first. Granger just Stunned me and dragged me off into a quiet corner, as far as I know." And Granger was damned unimportant at this point. Draco didn't know why Snape kept bringing her up. "She didn't stop talking the whole way back here, and that usually means she's fine." He swallowed hard. "She... told me a bit, about you. About what happened. I was sick," he added, blushing with deep embarrassment, but wanting his godfather to know that he was still himself; still weak-stomached and easily unnerved and with a measure of decency concealed inside him somewhere in the region of his oesophagus.

Snape smiled faintly. If Hermione had been up to dragging Draco anywhere, followed by a bout of trademark non-stop nattering, she was clearly on good form, and he could stop worrying about her and just appreciate her tact in allowing him time to talk to Draco. And her generosity in helping to rescue the boy and bringing him to him in the first place. Seeing Draco's sorrow and self-deprecation, he was suddenly flooded with vast relief - with relief and with unaccustomed tenderness. "Miss Lovegood," he said softly, "would you - leave us for a while?"

"No," Luna said flatly. "But I'll go into the bedroom and just watch from there, and you can do that Muffly thing you do." She unfolded to her full height, such as it was, and gave Draco a considering look. "And if you do turn out to be an enemy, and you try to harm him, well, the Entrail-Expelling curse isn't at all difficult, you know... which would be quite poetic, really."

Draco blinked at her in confusion. "Why would it?"

She looked at him thoughtfully. "You don't know, do you? They cut his stomach open and then dumped him in a store-cupboard where we wouldn't find him for a day and a half. Silenced, you see."

Draco stared at her for a long moment. "They... they cut his..." He swallowed hard, and swallowed again, feeling chilly sweat break out on his forehead as his stomach tried to rebel and was foiled by its emptiness. "Granger didn't tell me that. Didn't tell me a lot, I think. She didn't say they'd... done that... or mention the scars..." Unconsciously he lifted a hand to his own cheek. "She said they'd tortured him, but I thought... I don't know what I thought. Not this." His eyes stung, and he rubbed them surreptitiously with a hand drawn over his face. "I don't have that foul an imagination, thank Merlin."

"There were maggots," Luna said dispassionately, as Snape snapped "Leave it, Lovegood!" - seeing Draco reel where he stood. He understood what she was doing and appreciated her vigilance, but at this point he would rather take a chance on the boy's sincerity than torment him with things he could not have helped. "Draco - come here, now, and sit down." He patted the side of the bed firmly.

As his godson made his unsteady way across the room, Snape picked up his wand and tapped the tumbler on his bedside table, silently summoning water to the glass. "Sit down now, and drink this." As the boy looked at him wanly over the rim of the beaker, the older man sighed and pulled a wry face which only accentuated the scars leading from the corners of his mouth. "It was - bad, and I won't pretend to you that it wasn't but, as you see, I did survive, and I am... recovering at a reasonable rate. And Lovegood: if you tell him anything else that distresses him he _will_ spew, and I shall expect you to clean it up - without magic."

Draco gave a very faint snort that might have been amusement. "Granger didn't tell me about..." He gestured at his own stomach with a shaking hand. "Once I started being sick she wouldn't tell me any more detail, she said she was afraid I'd turn inside out." He smiled a weak, queasy smile. "She was probably right."

"All right," Luna said brightly, "I don't think you're faking. But I'd still like your wand, please, before I leave you two alone."

Draco bared his teeth at her in sudden annoyance. "Since when did you join the Aurory?"

"It's all right, Lovegood," Snape said quietly, "I'll vouch for him."

"Thanks," Draco muttered. "It's not like I could ever outdraw you, anyway."

"There is that, also." As Luna retreated to the bedroom, the spitting ball of surplus energy following behind her like a puffskein made of crackling force, and seated herself on a chair from which she could watch them through the open door, Snape raised the _Muffliato_ screen which would enable Draco and himself to speak without being overheard.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Draco finished the water, feeling his stomach reluctantly start to settle. "It always embarrassed my father horribly," he said quietly. "The weak stomach, I mean. I'm sort of glad about that, now." He winced, the thought of his father a raw wound now. "Mother cried when I told her about you," he said, wanting Snape to know that not all his family were as vile and treacherous as his father seemed to have been. "Just a bit. She didn't let anyone else see." He looked down at his hands. "I did, too," he whispered. "When I thought you were dead."

"Look at me, Draco," Snape said quietly. "It was the right thing to do, to try to have me... to try to end it. It was only by a fluke - because of Potter, if you can believe that - that I survived, and if I had not done so - which was by far the most likely outcome - then it would have been... far better to have died at the outset." Better for the Order and the cause, perhaps, if he had done so anyway, before he spilled his secrets like bloody rain. "It _was_ the right thing, and I thank you for it, even though - even though your father cheated you out of your bargain."

"It was the only thing I could think of to help. I wanted to rescue you, but I knew my father would be watching me too closely." Draco frowned, as he realized what he'd heard. "Potter saved you? But he hates you. I'd have thought he'd be pleased to see you all... broken."

"You would have thought so, but apparently - apparently when I disappeared he was so certain that I'd returned to my - _master_ voluntarily, that when he found out quite how wrong he was he was overcome by remorse - as unlikely as that sounds." He drew a deep breath. "They - that is, the Dark Lord, assisted by your father, Pettigrew, Bellatrix and Macnair," he said, nearly steadily, "they bound me so that I couldn't die, and no healing or - or pain-relieving spells or potions would help me. I was very sick - infected, you understand, and starved and, and burned - their intention was that Headmaster Dumbledore and the rest would have to watch me suffering, for hours or days, unable to, to alleviate my pain in any way, and then when the spell that kept me in my body finally wore off I would die of blood-poisoning."

He looked at Draco's steadily whitening face, which was now the same colour as the sheets he sat on, and sighed. "But Potter - you know how stubborn he is, there's nothing he thinks he can't do, but in this case it worked in my favour. He insisted that there were Muggle medical techniques which would keep me alive long enough for them to work out how to lift the curses which kept me from being healed magically, and that H - Miss Granger would know what they were. She in turn called in her half-sister's fiancé - the young man whose wedding she was attending at the hotel - who is a Muggle healer, and he managed to keep my - crumbling ruin of a carcase alive long enough for Bill Weasley and Professor Flitwick to unravel the curses. For which also I gather they needed Potter, since part of it had to be undone in Parseltongue."

"I... I see." Draco nodded, scowling. "Then I'll have to thank him, damn it, which I'll hate like poison but for saving you I will do it. And Granger, too, for helping to heal you as well as for saving me." He smiled a little. "She's not bad, for a Muggle-born, is she?"

"Not... bad, no."

Draco didn't notice the strange expression on his godfather's face. The horrors his godfather had suffered made his stomach clench and churn uncomfortably, and the debt to Potter (horrible) and to Granger (unsettling) made him feel no better. "It's... I keep half-hoping I'll wake up," he admitted in a sudden rush. "That all this will be a dream. That my father didn't betray me and that I'm not trying to run from him and from... from _Him_, and that the world's still the same as it was this morning. But I don't want it to be a dream, because you're alive and safe, even if you're not exactly well. I wanted you to be alive." He leaned down to hug his godfather, awkward and sudden and desperately glad that at least one adult in his life had turned out to be trustworthy and good...

Caught unawares, seeing the silver-haired figure suddenly lunge down at him from a height, as that other almost-identical, taller white-blond figure had done so many times before, Snape yelped in fright and jerked away, striking his head and shoulder against the oak headboard as he did so; and the sudden sharp, bruising pain forced him further down into the cesspit of memory, until the surface was over his head entirely. Overbalancing onto his unsupported left side, he pressed himself back against the end of the bed, babbling "Lucius, no, don't, please, no, stop..." over and over.

Draco had jumped away when his godfather flinched, frozen for a moment as Snape collapsed, whimpering in that ruined voice. Then he reached out nervously, wanting to mend the damage he'd somehow done, but Lovegood was suddenly there, pushing him aside. "Don't lunge at him, for pity's sake, it upsets him."

"But... I didn't..." He flinched himself as he heard his father's name, and a horrible suspicion formed in his mind. His father had tortured his godfather with his own hands. Had maybe even... Draco's stomach was too tightly knotted even for nausea at that vile thought.

"Shush." Lovegood knelt by the bed, soothing and coaxing until her level, eternally unruffled voice cut its way through to Snape in his mindless terror, anchoring him to a little island of warmth and safety in the midst of chaos.

"That's it, now, sir," the calm voice was saying, as the small hand slipped into his and clasped it firmly. "Breathe for me - that's it." When he uncurled a little, she slid her arms around him, careful and unthreatening, and hugged him close, letting the dark head rest on her thin shoulder. "It's only Draco, sir, not Mr Malfoy. He's a silly boy, but I'm sure he didn't mean to scare you." She gave Draco a disapproving look.

Draco couldn't help a tiny ripple of annoyance at being dismissed with a "silly boy" and a fish-eyed look from Loony Lovegood. But his godfather's almost tearful whimpers were far more important, and he knelt beside the bed, reaching out very cautiously to touch Snape's hand. "I'm sorry," he said quietly, trying to mimic the soothing evenness of Lovegood's voice. "I didn't mean to startle you..."

Snape nodded once, convulsively, without opening his eyes, and relaxed bonelessly into Lovegood's hold as his breathing and his racing heartbeat gradually slowed towards normal. After a moment he reached out, still blindly, took Draco's hand in his and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

Draco returned the squeeze very gently. "I'm sorry," he said again, looking up at Lovegood. "I wouldn't... he's all I have, now." It was uncomfortable, being humble to her, but it seemed as if she'd need to know. "My family... well, disowned is the best part of what I'll be, especially if my father catches me. Professor Snape is my godfather, and the only person who might want to even be associated with me just now." He wrapped his other hand around the thin, scarred one, cradling it gently in both of his.

Snape made a harsh noise and opened his eyes, looking directly at his godson. "You're the nearest thing to family _I've_ had for bloody years, ever since my mother - " He gripped Draco's hand firmly, using it to haul himself up to a sitting position as Lovegood braced his back, and then looked away, colouring dully. "I'm sorry," he muttered inconsequentially; "sorry I didn't send you a Christmas present this year, but I thought that your father - ah, God." He started to shake, grimacing as he did so. "What you must - bloody think of me, I'm s-sorry you lost your family because of me but, believe me, you're better off without them - Lucius, at any rate. But I'm sorry that all you have left is a, a stupid fucking weakling who can't even keep his own troubles to himself when you need him."

"You're not weak. You're the bravest person I know." Draco shook his head, squeezing his godfather's hand gently. "And I'm worried about my mother. The strain was getting to her before, and with me vanishing... but the rest are no bloody loss, I know that now. Knew it before, really, I just didn't want to know it, if you know what I mean. I'm not as brave as you are." He looked down at their joined hands. "And given what I know about Aunt Bellatrix's... predilections, and my father's, I think you probably have every reason to be a bit shaky still." He looked up slowly, knowing he'd see the truth of it in Snape's eyes and desperately not wanting to. He'd known for some time that his father sometimes did that, but he didn't want to think about it, especially not with his godfather.

Snape looked at him levelly for a moment, and then shut his eyes. "'A bit shaky' is a masterly understatement, Draco." He bit his lip, horribly embarrassed but wanting Lucius's son to understand that Lucius was something more complex than the straightforward, giggling sadist his sister-in-law was. "Luna, would you...?"

"Yes," she said, smiling faintly at the use of her given name, and gathered herself up and took herself beyond the limits of the Muffliato charm.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Your - father," Snape said quietly, when she had gone, "the family wanted him to marry and get an heir, but he was never - never that interested in girls. Except Bellatrix, and that only because she was rather... masculine. But he thinks if he - if he takes what he wants by force, and it serves the Dark Lord's interests, then he isn't really being unfaithful, and so he - makes the most of his opportunities. When he can. And sharing a victim with Bellatrix is almost like... he can have her without really having her, you understand, and afterwards he can go home to your mother and think that he is honouring the marriage-bed and keeping himself pure."

He forced himself to look up again, meeting his godson's shadowed grey eyes. "But you shouldn't think that he - it wasn't just him, you understand. Really he was only doing - what they were nearly all bloody doing."

"You mean that all of them... to you?" Draco said quietly, and his godfather nodded tightly, wondering if the boy would recoil from him now he knew.

Draco looked away, shame making it hard to look his godfather in the eyes. "I should have done more. I knew you were there, I should have... have gone to Dumbledore, or got a message to him, or something. I could have, if I'd really tried. If I'd been less afraid of getting hurt." He swallowed hard. "I would have. If I'd known it was that, I wouldn't have tried to bargain with my father. I would have done anything to help you, even if I did get hurt. And I should have known and I'm really sorry that I was too much of a coward." He managed to meet Snape's eyes, his own tearing up a little as he saw the scars again. "You've always looked out for me, even when I was being a snotty little shit and didn't deserve it. I wish I'd been able to do something for you when you needed me."

There was a level of truth in what the boy was saying, Snape knew it - a level on which the child he had loved had abandoned him to misery and torment, rather than face even the possibility of danger to himself. But Draco had never been brave in the face of physical pain - a weakness which Lucius had sneered at, which had only made it worse.

"As I understand it," he said quietly, "you believed that your father had kept his promise to you and finished me within the first ten days, even if - even if to some extent you believed it because you wished to believe it. The dilemma facing you was whether to take what you believed to be a certainty of finishing me, at little risk to yourself, or a small chance of saving me at great risk to yourself, and at great risk of failing to save me and of leaving me still alive in their hands - and I would remind you that as your godfather and your Head of House it is my place to take risks for you, not yours for me." It was the honest truth - but at the same time he was drearily aware that nobody, when it came down to it, would ever think that he was worth taking a risk for.

"On the face of it, your choice was a rational one. Your failure lay in trusting your father to keep his word - a thing which he has never done if it suited him not to, except to your mother; and then only by tying the spirit of the law into a reef knot. It is moot whether alerting the Headmaster as to my whereabouts would have done any good, since most of the Dark Lord's prisons are Unplottable, and in any case you believed that you had - resolved the problem. It would have been more... Gryffindor to have risked your own life in an attempt to save me alive, instead of killing me, but you would have had little chance of success, and I do not see how the equation would have been changed by knowing that I was being..."

He jerked his head neurotically, his mouth tightening into a bitter line. "It's very... _old-fashioned_ of you to suggest that you wouldn't have risked your own skin to save me from four months of bloody agony, but you would have to save me from - shame - "

"It's not just that. I thought it was... more of the same. There've always been those who - well, who probably didn't fail the Dark Lord, a lot of the time, but he thought they did. They were tortured with Cruciatus for a while, maybe a few other hexes too, and then the bodies left where someone would find them. I thought that it would be like that. Maybe for a little longer, because of who you are, but... the same. And that my father could end it a bit early, if I begged him, and make it seem like your heart gave out or something. That happens a lot, from what he's let slip at the dinner table."

Draco found himself stroking the thin hand in his absently, the same way he did when his mother was hurt and weepy and needed his comfort. "If I'd known it was going to be all... all that it was, torturing you and doing... that, for months and months, then nothing would have stopped me from trying to get to you. To save you or to... to end it, if I could. No matter what happened to me because of it." He smiled a sad, twisted smile. "Which isn't as brave as it sounds, because I know damned well my mother would have made sure that I wasn't made to suffer too much, one way or another. She loves me enough for that."

If worst came to worst, Narcissa was by no means incapable of poisoning her beloved son as well as herself, to take them beyond the reach of the Dark Lord's punishment. Draco hoped that she was all right - it would grieve her to know he'd been taken away by Dumbledore and his minions, but he hoped she'd realize that he was probably safer with the side who were morally opposed to torture at least some of the time.

Snape moved his hand in his godson's grasp, the lines of strain in his face easing a little. "I will - speak to the Headmaster about using the house-elf network to send a message to your mother to let her know that you are safe. And that I am, if you think that that will be of any interest to her."

"Thank you," Draco said quietly, sounding sad and subdued. "And... besides. It's not you who should feel ashamed. My father should, and all the others, for doing those things, but not you."

"Everybody says that," Snape said bitterly, "but nobody can suggest any way that I can stop feeling ashamed."

"Was that why you - why you asked Lovegood to leave - so she wouldn't find out...?"

Snape made a little "tsk"-ing noise. "I didn't think it would be - appropriate - to discuss your parents' marriage in front of an outsider and in your presence. But the rest of it, I assure you, she already knows - probably in graphic and unpleasant detail, although it's hard to remember what I have said when I was - not fully awake."

He sighed and shut his eyes for a moment, lifting his hand from Draco's grasp and absent-mindedly rubbing the heel of it across the scar which bisected his cheek. "I don't know if Granger told you, but I am - I am still weak enough that I need to spend a lot of time sleeping, during the day as well as at night, and sometimes when I wake I am - confused. Disoriented. I need to have someone with me at all times, to help me to - to recognize where I am if I should become - disoriented. Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall, Madam Pomfrey and - and Granger, Lovegood and Longbottom have been taking it in turns to sit with me, and as such they have been... when I have nightmares, which you will understand is a, a common occurrence, I tend to talk in my sleep, now, as well as - what you saw. So they are all well aware of what... But it is still - difficult - to talk about it deliberately and in daylight, even to - to those who already know."

"Oh." Draco considered that, and nodded, making a bit of a face. "I'm glad you've had people looking after you properly, even if they had to be Gryffindors. Most of them, anyway. And you don't need to talk about it any more. Aunt Bellatrix has dropped enough little hints when Mother wouldn't hear for me to... uh... get the idea. Of what she does." Draco gave him a hopeful look. "Would I be able to help? To sit with you? I'm not bad at that - I mean, I've done it for Mother when she's not quite well, and she always seemed to like it." Lucius had disapproved thoroughly of that, naturally, but Draco had quite enjoyed the quiet times with Narcissa, even when she was fretful and out of temper.

Snape turned his face aside, colouring slightly. "It's not - that simple," he muttered. "I - often when I am - disoriented I... need to be held. Like a bloody - mewling fucking _infant_. And at night. But if you think that you..." He suddenly became aware of Lovegood still watching them through the open bedroom door. She seemed to be training the ball of surplus energy to do tricks; as he watched her she caught his eye and smiled at him approvingly.

"Oh." Granger's strangely protective attitude when she'd talked about him suddenly made rather more sense. She was inclined to fuss over people, from what he'd seen, and if she'd been holding and comforting his godfather all this time she was probably just as possessive of him as she was of Potter, by now. "I think I could do that. I mean, I've not had much practice at being comforting, but I'd try." The thought was a little embarrassing, but he would do it anyway. It would actually be rather pleasant to have an excuse to curl up with someone, now and then.

Snape smiled faintly, as at some private joke. "You could always offer me a peppermint and a clean handkerchief... But if you think that you could - cope with me when I am dissociative or disturbed then you will be welcome to take your turn, once you are settled in; indeed, I shall insist on it. I don't know if Lucius arranged for a tutor for you while you were - detained, but even if he did, you are going to need a great deal of remedial coaching if you are to have any hope of sitting NEWTs this year, and the sooner we begin, the better."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I thought you were dead," the boy said again, his voice muffled against his godfather's by now rather damp shoulder. "I couldn't stop seeing you - hung up like that, and I thought you were dead and that it was my word, my decision that killed you, because even that was better than..."

Snape patted his godson's back awkwardly. "In which case," he said lightly, "it's probably just as well I _didn't_ send you a Christmas present."

"I would have wet myself," Draco admitted. "I nearly did when Granger told me you'd been asking after me, but I thought - I don't know what I thought. That you were... but ghosts don't send people presents."

"Not usually, no, although I sometimes think the Baron would if he could. He was Head of House, in his day, and he still takes a very... proprietary interest."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Strictly speaking, it shouldn't have been her shift until almost midnight, but Professor Dumbledore met her at the doorway and ushered her in, before taking himself off with a secret smile. Hermione shut the door behind her with a relieved sigh. That had been fun. In the way that wasn't. Thank goodness Madam Pomfrey had eventually chased everyone off so her leg could be bandaged and her burns dressed. She actually thought she'd come out rather well... a few minor burns and a fairly small steel spike through the thigh was a lot better than most people did when confronted with Death Eaters, especially when they'd been caught stealing something as valuable as a Malfoy. She was feeling a little proud of herself, and since Draco had presumably filled his godfather in during their reportedly sweet reunion, she could skip the explanations and move right along to the thanks and kisses.

Draco, unfortunately, had left the explanation at "Granger helped" and "she told me what happened", leaving his godfather with the comforting impression that the girl had hung around in the background, handling the shouting and letting the adult members of the Order do the fighting. He hadn't mentioned injuries. He certainly hadn't mentioned injuries too serious to be mended immediately. Hermione hobbled towards the very soft, inviting-looking bed, giving him a weary smile. "Hello," she said affectionately. "Room on there for two?"

Snape stared at her in some alarm. "Merlin, Hermione, what have you been doing to yourself? Come here and sit down at once."

"I thought Draco would have told you." She limped over and sat down on the bed, twining her fingers with his. "We went to rescue him. Well, steal him, to be more precise. I knew you were worried about him, and thought he'd had second thoughts, and seeing him under guard seemed to clinch it, so..." She shrugged. "It took me a little while to talk Hestia and Thomas into it, but I managed. And Madam Pomfrey says my leg will be all right in a day or two."

"You assumed Draco would have told me what? Draco told me that you saw that he was under guard and obviously some sort of prisoner, and alerted the Aurors. Which, I am starting to think, was somewhat less than transparently honest of the little fool. Exactly what did you do? And don't think I won't know if you lie about it."

"Oh. Well, it might have looked that way to him. They weren't Aurors, they were the Order people Professor Dumbledore sent with me as... bodyguards, of sorts. They wanted my parents and me to leave early because someone told them that Draco had been seen in the hotel, and when I found out he was under guard and looking upset - I've known him for years, I know that pinched little look on his face, it's how he looks just after someone's done something horrible to him and he's not sure how to retaliate - I decided we should rescue him."

"Yes, I do know the expression you mean. But you mean to stand - sit there - and tell me that you yourself took a direct part in this... escapade? Without even arranging for adequate backup?"

"I did!" she said defensively, and then paused. "Well... I arranged for backup. Which is more than Harry would have done. But only Kingsley could get there quickly, and we didn't know where Draco was going to be taken next, and I thought the moment had better be seized. So the other three concentrated on the guards, and I nobbled Draco - I wasn't sure if he WAS sorry, at all, so I thought I'd better disarm him and so on just in case, but without hurting him. I would have gotten away without a scratch if Macnair hadn't had a second wand in his boot."

"Dear God, do you mean to tell me that you went into a direct confrontation with Walden Macnair - and gave him a reason to bear you a personal grudge? Do you know what that man is? What the Hell were you _thinking_, you bloody little fool?" Albus had told him - in the brief interval between Draco's departure in search of a meal, a bath and bed and Hermione's somewhat unsteady entrance - that Amycus had been captured, but he hadn't mentioned the identity of The One That Got Away - a much bigger fish, indeed.

"Yes, I know what he is, I've encountered him before, at the Ministry in fifth year. Believe me, it was a personal pleasure to burn that sleazy little moustache right off his face." This was not going according to plan. Damn it. "I couldn't just leave Draco there with him, could I?" she asked, shifting tack. "If I'd waited about, they might have taken him off who knows where, and we might never have found him again."

"You encountered him at the Ministry - oh God. You have no fucking _idea_. Half the fucking nightmares I have are about Macnair - _literally_ bloody 'fucking', or whips, knives - it was Macnair who cut my stomach open and then bloody - _used_ me anyway." To her alarm and distress, he started to shake, glaring at her wildly. "Of course I care about Draco, I'm so - pleased to have him here safe from that bastard of a father of his but I value you too you idiot girl, and Draco wasn't actively in danger and you were. How do you think I would have felt if you'd been killed - or captured? Oh God. I would have had to have given myself up to them again to get you back."

She slid her arms around him, crooning wordlessly as she held him to her. "You would NEVER have to go back to them," she whispered fiercely. "Not for me, not for anyone. There were only two of them, and four of us, and Macnair is never at his best when he's surprised. And even if it had gone wrong, even if they had managed to capture me..." She shuddered at the thought, and hugged him a little tighter. "I wouldn't have been there long. I don't go anywhere without a knife anymore, poisoned and easy to reach. Even if they pushed a bezoar down my throat within seconds, it would still be too late."

He was shaking hard now, and she held him tighter. "I wouldn't want to, I do NOT want to have to do that, but I promise you, if it's that or being in Voldemort's hands... then I would make sure it ended quickly, and on my terms. I wouldn't let them hurt me, and I would NOT let them ever touch you again, I promise you." After seeing the state he was in, she'd taken steps to ensure that she wouldn't be caught without a means of killing herself quickly if the need arose... and she'd made sure Harry knew, so he wouldn't go charging off to rescue her if she was captured.

"Idiot!" he gasped. "You _know_ what they did to me - they bound my soul to my body when I should have been already dead from septicaemia - if you didn't get the timing exactly right, they'd just do the same to you while they worked out the bloody antidote. And then bind you against killing yourself, like they bloody-well did me." He was still shuddering with panic. "I don't want to lose you, I don't want to lose you, but better that than you being in their hands! Ah, God, I don't want to have to think of them doing - those things - to you. Not to you."

"They won't. They won't, I promise!" She sighed, resting her forehead against his. "And I'm sorry, I'm not being very reassuring. I won't take any more foolish risks, I promise. I just... Draco looked so miserable, and so... uncertain. I couldn't leave him. And I knew you wanted him back."

"I did, I do - but I don't even want to think about having to - choose between you. If I'd gained him and lost you, how could I have kept myself from - hating him? And - you might not even get the chance to try it. _I_ carry poison, but I never got the chance to use it - they stripped me bare in minutes and they watched me - all the time, watching me, every bloody minute of every day."

"Well, yes, but you're _you_. Slippery, devious, and much more powerful than most of them. I'm just a nasty little Mudblood." She rocked him, kissing him gently. "I'm sorry I scared you, I really am... and I was fine. We caught them by surprise, they were both down in moments, and aside from that one blast from Macnair, they hardly even had time to put up a fight. Shhhh... oh, love, it's all right..." She held him until the shaking eased a little, kissing him and making soothing noises.

"Draco didn't know, what they'd done to you," she said quietly, when he seemed a bit calmer. "He was sick, when I told him. I... didn't go into detail, but even the bare bones had him throwing up for some time. After that, he all but begged to be allowed to tell Professor Dumbledore everything he knew. Which I suspect is a lot more than Lucius knows that he knows... Draco eavesdrops."

"Draco is a sly, conniving little sneak - and I say this as one who has known him since he was in nappies. And you don't need to - to spare my blushes as regards the - sexual aspect, because he already worked that one out when he flung his arms round me without warning and I nearly jumped out of my bloody skin. Unlike you, he has a very good idea of what Macnair and his father and dear Aunt Bellatrix are capable of - even if he doesn't know about - about Pettigrew and his little penknife."

He shuddered again and sighed, and then broke away from her embrace to sit facing her, tilting her chin up with his fingers and giving her his sternest professorial look. "I suppose I should be proud that you acquitted yourself so well in a fight. But if you're going to take bloody stupid fool risks - without even being misled into them by the Idiot Boy - then I insist that you let me tutor you in duelling and Defence Against the Dark Arts myself. That is - when Filius gets off his backside long enough to get me off mine."

"You would? Really?" She beamed at him. "Absolutely. I accept. Will I get a treat every time I do something foolish? Because if I will, there are some Slytherins outside I could taunt."

"Don't think it's going to be a sinecure," he said darkly. "Potter will tell you that when it comes to teaching defence techniques I play rough - I don't think you can learn to defend yourself even half adequately without facing a realistic challenge. The best I can promise you is to try not to throw you against anything with sharp corners. And if you don't hit me back - hard - I'll throw you again. Draco may have a 'not-hitting-girls thing' but the Death Eaters don't - and therefore, I can't afford to."

She grinned at him. "Severus, you are trying to warn me, the Brain of Gryffindor, that you're going to be teaching me thoroughly. This is like telling an epicure that they're going to get a gourmet meal whether they like it or not." She twined her fingers with his. "Seriously... I think it's a good idea. Harry's done his best, but I know he's not really going to attack me. You... I know you wouldn't do any permanent damage, but you're not going to worry about every bump and bruise the way Harry would. And I want to learn as much as I can... just as usual." She paused. "I can do a corporeal Patronus... want to see?"

To her surprize he winced and dropped his eyes. "What is it, Severus?" she asked quietly, and then winced herself. "I know that - that it's a spell that even some very experienced and powerful wizards have problems with." A horrible suspicion was dawning that he truly had no good memories to draw on.

Severus shook his head tightly. "It's not that I _can't_ do one but it - not really mine, as such. A copy of... one that belonged to a friend."

Hermione frowned. "Belonged... in the past tense?"

The same sharp, curtailed movement - a nod, this time. "She died. And we - we were no longer on good terms when she - died, and it was my fault." That was enough, surely? - he didn't have to say that her death was his fault too, that he had seen her die... "I have no good memories, except of her friendship, or if I ever did have the Dementors sucked them out of me when I was in Azkaban. They didn't take my memories of her because they - hurt more than they healed, but by the same token the Patronus I generate in her memory can't save me from a Dementor either - it's too easy for them to twist it and make me remember her death, our quarrel" - my guilt, he added in the privacy of his own head. "And I've no other good memories that I could use to generate a Patronus of my own."

And he wasn't sure that he would if he could, that was part of the secret in his heart, that he prized his own penance, his own loyalty to a dead girl's memory, too much to want to give it up. He tried to push the thought aside, to concentrate on this other girl who might be his lover as Lily never was (even if he might not ever love her as completely as he had loved Lily), and flashed Hermione one of his dry, self-mocking smiles. "But yes - show me. 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours' - isn't that what little boys are supposed to say to little girls behind the garden shed? We need to be able to recognize each other's Patronuses even when there isn't an opportunity to sense the... the spirit that animates the image."

She leaned in to kiss him, and then felt guilty for it, knowing that it hadn't been solely for his comfort. The disguised pain in his voice when he spoke of his 'friend'... she'd have wagered there was more than friendship, at least for him, and he'd lost her and it still hurt him. It was horribly unfair to be jealous of her, whoever she was... but she couldn't bring herself to ask for a name, either. "Have you tried lately?" she asked, trying to sound as if she'd noticed nothing at all. "Because if I need to put more work into creating good memories for both of us, I think I can bear the sacrifice." She kissed him again, then sat back, pulling her wand out of her sleeve. _"Expecto Patronum!"_

A moment later, her silvery otter was swimming through the air around them, seeming intrigued by Severus and appearing almost to sniff him as it gambolled past. Hermione smiled fondly at it. "Look, it likes you!"

He reached out to touch it, fascinated. "Amazing. It looks almost solid - which is a lot more than mine did at your age. And - seriously, I'm all for - trying to build up a stock of good memories involving... but at the moment anything to do with sex, anything to do with feeling aroused, is still all tangled up with terror and pain and - shame. However much... However - delightful carrying on with you may be, if I tried to use it to generate a Patronus in the presence of a real Dementor, it would be too easy for the mind-raper to twist and warp that connection and leave me - sobbing on the floor in a circle of Death Eaters again, waiting to see who'll be first. Not, however," he added lightly, "that that is any reason to desist from building up a stock of - pleasant memories having to do with sex. There are more important things in life than fooling around with a wand. Um - the wooden kind, that is."

He picked his new wand up off the bedside table and flourished it with self-mocking bravado. _"Expecto Patronum!"_ The cloud of sparkling silver flowed together and formed itself into a delicate white doe, slender-legged and nervy and solemn-eyed, poised and tense as if to skitter away at a word.

"Oh, Severus," Hermione said softly; "she's - beautiful!"

"I wish I could claim that beauty for myself," he muttered, and thought that he meant it in more than one sense, for he had wished to have claimed Lily herself. "She was - beautiful, and the Patronus reflects the beauty in her, not in me." Did he still wish it? If Lily had loved him instead of James, things would have gone very differently but he would then have lost something valuable, a loving connection, as well as gained one.

Hermione gave him a troubled look, hating the way his gaze seemed to turn unhappily inwards on himself. "I don't think you could summon something so - so lovely, if you didn't have a bit of loveliness in you."

"Perhaps," he agreed, sounding sad and tired. "I've never been able to see any loveliness in myself, even before they... And I always thought that if I were ever to grow a Patronus of my own, one that wasn't a copy of hers, it would still be a mere bloody copy, because it would be Fawkes, the same as Dumbledore's. Fawkes, you see, Fawkes has been my safety and cried for me when I was injured ever since I first became Dumbledore's man. Except the last time, of course, when - Riddle made sure that even a phoenix's magic could not heal me or ease my pain, and my survival depended, in the last resort, on Harry bloody Potter's pig-headed refusal to accept the inevitable. But I absolutely refuse to have Potter become my new Patronus!"

Hermione reached out, her fingers tracing the soft, mobile ears, the slender column of the neck which arched under her hand. "It's beautiful," she said again softly, and then she sighed. "And... before... I wasn't really referring to sex." Egotistical, to hope that being loved by her would constitute a memory good enough for a Patronus, and she forced jealousy away again. She was glad that there had been someone, even if she'd died eventually, that his life hadn't been quite as lonely as it might have been. And she'd keep telling herself that until it was so.

"I mean, waking up to find Professor McGonagall asleep on you with all her paws in the air, for example..." she added hastily, grinning at him. "Or Draco being safe, that could be a good one."

Her otter swam over to nose her cheek gently before fading away.

"I had the impression that you were referring specifically to the fact that you were kissing me when you said it" Snape said, rather stiffly. "But yes, I have many strikingly good memories from the last few months, most of them involving you or Minerva or - remarkably - Longbottom. I think you realize how... good for my ego it is to feel loved and wanted, whether or not I entirely believe in it.

"Even so, all these things to some extent spring out of having been tortured, and a Dementor could I am sure twist them against me. It would tell me, for example, that I was using you, imposing on your innocence as Lucius imposed on mine - and before you say it I know that you don't see it that way and in fact I don't, either. But I could be made to see it that way, if I were sufficiently undermined." Behind him the doe wavered in the air like a fading TV signal, and went out.

She took his hand, kissing the tips of his fingers lightly. "I wish I could make it better," she said wistfully. "But I know it's going to take a long time. We _will_ build better memories for you, though. Ones that stand on their own. And in the meantime, I promise, there'll be at least one otter between you and any Dementor."

"Thank you" he said gravely, although having his hand fiddled with made the skin between his shoulders twitch. "It should work well, they're very - ebullient creatures. But - count this as your first lesson, and remember. I spent long enough in Azkaban to know that if there's any way that a Dementor can twist your memories and turn them against you, it will. You've heard the phrase 'You are your own worst enemy?' It's hard for anybody, I think, not just for me, to find a memory so purely good that it doesn't have _some_ dark connections trailing off it like, like scraps of wool caught on a fence - so you need to generate your Patronus in a heartbeat, the instant you sense the Dementor and before it has a chance to twist you against yourself."

Hermione nodded. "I didn't know they could do that," she admitted, still clasping his hand gently. "I'll be careful... and I do have a few good memories which should be difficult to taint." She blushed. "One of the more effective ones I have is of the day I realized I could read all by myself. I'm a hopeless geek, you understand. But that should be difficult to... to twist against me."

"But, you foolish girl, your own words betray you. 'I'm a hopeless geek.' Part of you associates the mere fact that you were so proud of being able to read with being a social outsider, excluded - and there's your weakness, all laid bare and ready to be exploited."

She considered that, and made a face. "I hadn't thought of that. This is going to be a lot more complicated than Harry makes it sound, isn't it? Of course, pretty much everything is more complicated than Harry makes it sound... He's a good teacher, though," she added hastily. "He taught us all a lot in the DA."

"The DA? Do you mean that... 'Dumbledore's Army' business? I thought that that was just some sort of - _ad hoc_ council of war when Albus was exiled."

"Oh, no. We all got together every week or so and Harry taught us Defence Against the Dark Arts. Because he knew more than anyone else, and Umbridge was simply dreadful." She smiled brightly. "He got us all through our exams, he was really quite good at it."

"You mean you let that - that - suicidal lunatic who thinks that blind courage and trusting to dumb luck is an adequate substitute for skill and practice teach you the techniques your bloody _lives_ may soon depend on? Already have bloody depended on, in some cases - including yours. What were you _thinking_? _Were_ you thinking?"

"We were thinking that he was our best alternative... and he did it very well," Hermione said firmly. "He made sure we knew the basics, like Protego and Expelliarmus, and we got all the way to the Patronus before we got caught and had to stop. And I know you two don't get along, but he _is_ a good teacher... Neville actually got an A in his DADA O.W.L, did you know that? Not a single member of the DA failed, and God knows we would have if Umbridge had been our only teacher. Not to mention the fight at the Ministry..."

"I grant you he was probably a better teacher than Dolores Umbridge - there are things living under rocks that can teach better than dear Dolores. And - " He gritted his teeth. "If he enabled Longbottom to get decent marks in the practical exam, as well as in the theory, then I admit that he possibly does have some talent in that direction. But - you've seen him fight, apparently, and I haven't. On your honest opinion - and I trust you to give it - do you think that Neville has it in him to be a good duellist? I rather gathered, from his account, that his main contribution to the Ministry fiasco was to get his nose broken and to help carry you to safety which - for which I shall be exceedingly and eternally grateful, but which is more in the nature of a mediwizard's work. And if he is not suited to be a duellist, do you think that encouraging him to think that he is will make him more safe - or less so?"

"Neville is no duellist, nor will he ever be," Hermione admitted. "But that wasn't really the point. The DA was formed so we could learn to defend ourselves. Professor Umbridge was insisting that all we needed to know was the theory, that we were perfectly safe at the school... but we weren't, and we knew we weren't, and the idea of being helpless to defend ourselves against even the least threat..." She shuddered. "Lambs to the slaughter, we would have been, if she'd had her way. I know most of the DA couldn't have stood against a real attack by more than one or two Death Eaters, but at least they could probably have handled one."

"A valid point, I suppose - although in practice I gather that Longbottom did manage to inflict some damage on Macnair, using his wand - but he did so by poking him in the eye with it." Seeing her amused expression, he gave her a tight-lipped scowl. "You may think I'm trying to be funny - but this is lesson number two. The Death Eaters scorn Muggle ways, they think themselves above the hurly-burly of ordinary humanity, whether wizarding or otherwise. In their minds they bestride the world like a colossus, shaping fate with their vast magics - poke one in the eye, or better yet knee him in the groin, and they really don't have any counter to it, because that sort of thing is for plebs and they don't ever think of it in the same context as themselves."

Hermione smiled tentatively, but his expression was still grim. "And that's lesson number three, if you like. When you run up against a Dark wizard you won't have time to worry about whether you are 'doing it the right way', and in fact there _is_ no right way - just hit him as hard as you can with whatever comes to hand, magical or otherwise, because maintaining a firm grip on the initiative is half the bloody battle. And trying to do it by the bloody book may get you killed - unless it was a very heavy book with sharp corners, and you throw it at him."

Hermione nodded. "Like self-defence classes," she agreed, and then he gave her a puzzled look and she realized. "Oh... in self-defence classes, you know, the ones that people - women, generally - take to learn how to cope with being attacked by a mugger or something. They tell you over and over that the most important thing is to fight as hard as you can. Don't worry about hurting them, don't worry about not being a Nice Girl, just claw his bloody eyeballs out if you have to. And then run. My mum made me go, last summer, when she realized I might actually be involved in some fighting. And this is like that... bite, kick, scratch, poke your wand into their eye, whatever it takes. And carry weapons, because if the lads at school are any indication, pure-bloods are fine with other people's blood, but will frequently go completely to pieces at the sight of their own."

"It's actually a general 'boy thing', I think. I find that males of all ages, and females before the onset of puberty, are apt to faint if they get a nosebleed, for example. After puberty, obviously, females... well, learn to adapt. Most people who are regularly confronted with their own blood do, which - well, you'll understand that I had to be used to my own blood from a very early age, and that stood me in good stead at Death Eater meetings. Now, though, I fear I may have been - pushed so far out I'm coming back. I wasn't too bad last week when Adrian cut himself, I suspect because the smell of haddock and vinegar and mushy peas was so powerful it masked the blood-smell; but when Longbottom tripped over the floor and broke a glass and gashed his knee I damn' near passed out, which was highly embarrassing. But fortunately sixteen years as House Master to a dungeonful of quarrelsome neurotics kicked in and I was able to get him cleaned up and healed before _he_ passed out."

"Oh, dear... Neville's always doing that sort of thing, you'd think he'd be used to it by now." She shook her head ruefully. "I do see what you mean, though... Harry is actually more bothered by other people's than his own... from which I suspect he's seen a lot more of his own than most people... but Ron goes green every time."

"Pea-green with red hair - that must be a sight to conjure with. But Potter - yes, I imagine he is well-used to his own blood. Judging from what I saw when I was teaching him Occlumency he spent a lot of his formative years being slapped around by that overweight baboon of a cousin of his. Nosebleeds must have been a weekly occurrence."

"I suspected. He never talks about living with the Dursleys, but I know he's horribly unhappy with them. He almost cries every year when he has to go back to them... Mrs Weasley wanted to have him come and live with them, but Professor Dumbledore said no." She gave him a thoughtful look. "I didn't know you knew about it, though. I would have thought... I don't know... that knowing he's had just as miserable a home-life as you had might go some way towards blunting the Potter-based animosity."

"But it wasn't, really. Not anything like as bad." He sighed and made a vague, dismissive gesture. "I don't want to sound like a bloody martyred victim but that's one of the things that annoys me, that he sees _himself_ as that, that he thinks himself so hard done by, when really he has no idea how bad things can get.

"Don't misunderstand me - from what I saw his home life is immensely bleak and unloving, and the cousin and his cronies treated him about as badly as his bloody father and his cronies treated me - at least until he learned to terrorize the great, bullying oaf with the threat of magic. But they're not - he always knew that they're not his real family, that he once had loving parents, parents who loved him enough to bloody-well die for him. I didn't have that bloody luxury. And he thinks himself hard-done-by because if he cheeks his uncle his uncle sometimes wallops him round the ear, but he's never been whipped bloody just for existing, or had to work out how to splint his own arm because his family won't take him to the doctor in case the Social realize who broke it, or gone in constant fear that his father will one day keep his promise and kill him.

"Again, don't misunderstand me; judging from what little I saw, the Dursleys shouldn't be left in charge of a hat-stand. But Potter has no idea how much worse things could be, and not just - At least my family weren't - sexually abusive. Some of my poor little Slytherins... and there's almost nothing I can bloody-well do for them, because as you know there's no provision in wizarding law for taking a child from its parents, and even if there were doing so would have blown my cover. And yet Potter thought I should fall down on my knees and apologize for being nasty to him, because his family are... a bit neglectful, and make him do more chores than his cousin."

He sighed again. "All right Potter - very neglectful. But the business with the Pensieve was just the final bloody _straw_ - knowing that he had watched me being so - degraded by his bloody father and godfather, and that the son and all his little cronies would be having a laugh over my public humiliation. As if it never had stopped, as if it would never end, as if I was still - hanging there. Not that it - not that it really matters now. Comparatively speaking."

"You may sound like a martyred victim as much as you like, love, if you wish." Hermione frowned. "You can do something about the Slytherins now, you know, since your cover's blown anyway... and I'm sure many of them would rather side with you than with Voldemort, given the choice... but what business with the Pensieve? Harry mentioned once that Professor Dumbledore has one, but I didn't know you..." The rest of what he'd said caught up, and she gave him a horrified look.

"He looked? At someone else's memories? I am going to give him such a screaming-at that he'll curse his own ears off to escape! He knows better than that! When was it... is that why he stopped taking Occlumency lessons? Oooh, I KNEW there was something he wasn't telling me!"

"Unfortunately, Potter doesn't regard me as 'someone else' - he seems completely unaware that I might be made of actual flesh and blood and feeling just like real people," he said bitterly. "And it was Albus's Pensieve. I used it when I was teaching Potter Occlumency, to take out the emotion from the worst memories I have of his father, so that I could at least deal with him as himself - infuriating though he may be in his own right - rather than all the time seeing James Potter's face jeering at me. I was called away to deal with a serious attack on one of my Slytherins, and when I returned I found Potter Junior with his smug face thrust into my memory - into my soul - watching me being publicly humiliated and degraded by his charming father and godfather. I made sure he would have told you and Weasley, at least, all about it - and no doubt had a delightful laugh at my expense."

"You did him an injustice, then," Hermione said quietly. "He was miserable about something, Ron and I could both tell, but he wouldn't tell us what it was, or why he wasn't studying Occlumency anymore. And we almost got expelled finding him a way to talk to Sirius, and he wouldn't tell us why about that, either, only that he had to do it... which, if he'd seen that, makes sense. He loved Sirius rather desperately... to have someone finally around who really wanted him, a grownup who could fill, however awkwardly, the place of a parent, meant a lot to him. But he would never, _ever_, have thought that was funny, Severus, and knowing that Sirius and his father did made him very unhappy."

She sighed. "And you're right... he doesn't really see you as a person. Well, he does NOW, but he didn't until you came back to us. You obviously hated him, right from the start, and... and he was allowed to hate you. He couldn't hate his parents for leaving him, because they were the only people, he thought, who had ever loved him, and he couldn't hate the Dursleys openly because he was afraid to, and then he came here and there you were, loathing him on sight, and there Draco was being an utter arsehole to everyone, and you were Slytherins and he was _allowed_ to hate you, and to show it, encouraged to, even. Out of all the people who have hurt him and rejected him... you and Draco were the ones he was allowed to punish for it. I know it's not right, but he was only eleven when it started. And the more you hated him, the more... justified it seemed, I suppose."

"But I _didn't_ loathe the brat on sight - he loathed me! I admit, the prospect of having to teach James Potter's son made my skin crawl, I expected him to despise me I suppose, but I was willing to bite my feelings back and make a try at it. But I'd barely even glimpsed him at the Sorting, I was just peacefully eating my dinner when I looked up and there was that face, his father's face, staring at me as if I was everything he'd ever hated. I'd never even _spoken_ to him, and yet he hated me on sight. I had to assume that his family had brought him up to, to continue where his father left off. Which, actually, doesn't make sense, now I come to think about it, because his parents died before he could talk, and now that I know more about his background I don't believe the Dursleys ever talked to him about Hogwarts."

He frowned, biting his lip. "And you say he didn't - didn't make any capital out of having witnessed my public humiliation? That's... even so, whatever he said to Black, Black evidently convinced him that I deserved what I got, since he worships the bastard's memory, and I _know_ when I - disappeared, last year, he was sure I'd returned to my Dark Master. Voluntarily, I mean. That's why he's crawling with guilt towards me now."

"The way Harry tells it, his scar twinged, he looked up, and you were sitting there giving him a filthy look," Hermione said gently. "He had no idea why, not for ages. Until he got his letter, he didn't even know magic existed, let alone about old family grudges. And then, of course, there was our first Potions lesson, where you were sneering at him in front of everyone, and that was more or less that. You hated him, therefore he would hate you too. Of course, the Weasleys filling his ears with tales of the evil of Slytherin didn't help a great deal, but that was only after he got here.

"As for Sirius convincing him that you'd deserved it somehow... I don't know. Maybe. Harry would have wanted desperately to believe it... Sirius loved him, and you'd always hated him, and the last thing he would have wanted is to have to side with you against Sirius. And then, of course, Sirius died, and Harry knows that he was largely to blame and that you'd been right all along. For which I doubt he ever would have forgiven you, if you hadn't been hurt so dreadfully badly. It's much harder to forgive someone for being right than for being wrong, sometimes."

"Oh. But I wasn't... I mean, I only glared at him because he was glaring at _me_, I thought - I looked up, and there he was with that, that _violent_ hatred on his face, on his father's face, so of course I glared back. But - now that I think about it, I was speaking to Quirrell at the time, which means that without knowing it I was within a few feet of - of Him. My master and tormentor. God, Potter was looking straight at the monster without knowing it, under Quirrell's bloody stupid hat - when his scar hurt he must have thought it was somehow to do with me, because I was the one facing him. Well, the one facing him that he could _see_.

"And later I - I didn't know he hadn't had any wizarding education, Albus didn't bloody-well tell us that, we all thought he would have been given at least a basic grounding, especially as - well, his mother was really a Potions prodigy, so in that first lesson I took a chance; even though That Face made me feel like curling up and hiding under my bloody desk I risked making a fool of myself in front of the whole fucking class by asking him about asphodel and wormwood, which... well, any child with any wizard training would know that the symbolic meaning is - what?"

"Death and bitter sorrow" she replied promptly.

"But an asphodel is also a lily... I thought he must understand my meaning, that I bitterly regretted his mother's death, that his mother and I had been friends even if his father and I had not, and when he brushed off the question - I didn't know he was so untaught, I thought he was just - slapping me down. And then I saved his bloody life when Quirrell tried to hex him off his broom and all he did was glower at me as if it was somehow my bloody fault, and then at the start of second year I stood behind him and the weasel and listened to them discussing how very much they both hated me, and how much they both hoped I'd been sacked, and - well, it was all pretty-much downhill from there, until I found the little shit - violating my memories. Gloating over my humiliation. Except that now you tell me that perhaps he... wasn't as delighted by it as I in my haste assumed."

"I'm sure he wasn't delighted at all - I'm surprised he didn't apologize at the time, but perhaps he was just... too shocked. Seeing his father and Sirius behaving like that."

"I'm afraid I didn't give him much chance to apologize" he replied, tight-lipped. "I was so... I threw him across the room, and hurled a jar at his head. But he could have written to me afterwards, if he - you would think my reaction would have told him that I was - upset. But it would never occur to Perfect Potter to apologize for anything."

"It would never have occurred to him to write a note of apology... I doubt he's ever heard of such a thing," Hermione said wryly. "And even if it had, I think he would have assumed that you wouldn't accept an apology... he devoutly believes that you hate him and want to see him dead, or at least suffering some other horrible fate. Which seems dreadfully unfair, to him, since he'd done nothing at all to you when you started being nasty to him, and his father was... was such a cipher to him, then, that that connection seemed very vague. He never talks about it, but Hagrid told me once that he'd never even seen a picture of his parents, before Hagrid found him some, and that the Dursleys had told him they'd died in a car crash. I don't think he knew more about them than their names, before he came here... and I think that's one of the reasons he loathes Draco so much, actually. Draco was always boasting about his parents, about all the nice things they gave him and how important they were... and of course, Harry didn't know anything about them then, and he was almost as dreadfully jealous of Draco as he was of Ron. Having parents who were alive and could look after you, and who were wizards and wouldn't take your books and wand away when you went home..."

"Envying the Weasley boy is understandable - I've envied him myself, bitterly and for the same reason. But Draco... having Lucius for a father is like sharing a bath with an alligator, and Narcissa - she loves the boy, but she's a bit - fragile and, um, over-emotional, and more of a burden than a support. Not bad in bed, mind," he added, with a sudden wicked gleam, "but not what you want in a mother. Believe me, Potter is better off with the Dursleys - at least they're easier to ignore. And in fact Draco envies _him_, horribly.

"But Potter is even more of a fool than I thought he was, if he thinks I want to hurt him. The sight of him - the sight of That Face, coupled with the, the scorn and hatred he feels for me, which tastes like tin and lightning - makes me feel as if I'm fourteen again and that - bastard - is coming after me again, and I just want to curl up into a ball and cry: which is not a good state of mind for being especially patient in. Especially if one was never very patient to begin with. And hearing him going on and on about how wonderful his father was, and then the same about his bloody godfather, and making it clear that he thought - that he thought that I wasn't fully human, that the Headmaster had been right to treat my life as of no account - and don't pretend he didn't. You were there when he called me 'pathetic' for daring to mind the fact that Black was boasting about having tried to kill me, and expressing regret at having failed - just like his fucking father, who scrubbed my mouth out with soap in front of the whole fucking school for _daring_ to swear at him when he tortured me - and it was fucking torture - "

He stopped as if he'd run into a brick wall, breathing hard, his eyes black and wild. After a second or two of visible struggle he got control of his breathing again and went on more quietly. "Before I realized how much danger he was in, I did nurture a faint hope of getting the brat expelled, just to get his face and his open disdain as far away from me as possible. But I would never have hurt him - he's a student, for God's sake, it's my job to keep him alive and safe and I've done everything in my power to do so, quite apart from the fact that his mother was a, a friend, and even though the bloody little fool seems hell-bent on throwing his life away on a whim. But an apology - an apology from him might have - mended something. Not just in the present."

She wrapped her arms around him, holding him protectively. "I do remember that night... I have regular nightmares about it, actually. I've never been so frightened as I was that night, not even at the Ministry." She gave him a rather pointed look. "And Harry wasn't the only one being a complete prat that night, you know. I _tried_ to explain to you what was going on, more than once, and you kept screaming at me to shut up. Which probably did just as much to tick Harry off as you and Sirius loathing each other... he doesn't like it when people are rude to me."

He gave her a startled look, and she raised an eyebrow at him. It was entirely true... and a little gentle prodding mixed with the sympathy was a good idea, with him. "Not to mention you telling him that you should have just let him get himself killed, it would be no less than he deserved. I know you had every reason to be very upset, at that point... I don't think I'd be any less hysterical if someone dragged _me_ back into that place... but I'm sure you can see how it might have given him the idea that you'd like to see him come to a sticky end." He opened his mouth with an indignant expression, and she nodded. "Yes, I know, you took an enormous risk trying to save us, and I, at least, was grateful. But from Harry's point of view, you appeared just when he was starting to understand, for the first time, what had actually happened to his family... and you screamed at us, told him he deserved to get killed, and then started making threats."

She sighed. "And while an apology is more of a possibility now... I don't know. It's hard to admit you've been quite that appallingly wrong about absolutely everything for the last seven years. He feels guilty for a lot of it now, but... imagine how you'd feel, if he'd turned out to be right all along and you had to apologize to him."

"I'm not asking the brat to apologize for his every bad opinion of me - at least half of which are probably justified anyway. Just for invading my bloody memories: an act which you yourself, I might point out, just said he deserved to have his ears screamed off for. And I wasn't... you don't understand what it was like, Hermione. Black - after _years_ of bloody persecution he still managed to persuade me that he wanted to call a truce, and that if I would only take his dare and go where they went, they would let me join their bloody little Gang of Four. And I wanted so, so badly to believe, to think that I could be safe from them, to think that they would let me - me! - join the most popular, the most powerful -

"And I took his dare," he said quietly, "and I went down the tunnel, and there was nothing waiting for me there but death. I actually _saw_ Lupin, changing - if he'd made the change even a few seconds earlier I would have been torn to bloody rags before Potter Senior got there but as it was it held him up a bit, but I saw him - twisting, distorting - and I knew what Black had bloody-well set me up for, and what was about to happen to me. I _knew_.

"So yes I was - fucking terrified, if you'll pardon my language, finding myself trapped in that place again with Black and Lupin, and I had already nerved myself up to find the three of you already - horribly dead. Seeing Weasley with his leg snapped was only a slight improvement. And it didn't matter what you were screaming at me, it didn't matter what Black had told Potter or that Potter thought Black could give him what he wanted because I knew, I _knew_ that Black could charm the birds out of the trees and that he would tell Potter, or you, or Lupin whatever you most wanted to hear, and would be believed.

"And yes, as it happens, I was wrong, and if I had listened to Lupin's story about the map and the rat I would have realized that. But I was - overwrought, and I _knew_ that Black was a killer - which he still was, in intention if not in fact, whether or not he was guilty of the Muggle deaths - and I had absolutely no reason to think that Potter's newfound trust in Black meant anything except that the murderer was up to his old tricks again, and had duped you lot as thoroughly and as skilfully as he duped me."

He made the bitter face Hermione was coming to know too well, as full of scorn for himself as for anyone else. "And yes, for one moment there I did think that Potter deserved to die for his - _criminal_ stupidity, for his trust in the murderer. Why shouldn't I, when everybody seemed to think that _I_ had deserved to die for mine? He had just told me that I was pathetic, for minding hearing Black gloating over how close he had come to killing me, so obviously he thought that I had deserved to die for my - gullibility: so why shouldn't he die for his?"

Hermione sighed, touching his cheek gently. "I'm sorry, love," she said softly. "For... everything. And I hate the thought of you being so alone and unhappy when you were in school. Sirius Black was... I never liked him much, you know. Harry was different, after he turned up. More reckless, less willing to listen to reason... and Black used to encourage him to be like James, which seemed to boil down to taking idiotic risks right, left and centre. It was hard enough trying to make Harry be sensible without that.

"You're right about Harry, too... he does owe you an apology for that, more than anything else - although there are plenty of other things he should apologize for, too. But he really didn't tell anyone - except possibly Sirius, asking for an explanation - and he would never, ever think something like that was funny, or... or acceptable behaviour, either.

"And... this ongoing you-hate-me-so-I'll-hate-you thing that you both have really has to stop. I know you both quite enjoy it, in a horrible sort of way, but it's destructive, especially when the pair of you might need to work together rather urgently one day... and it's horrible for me, because I love you both so much and I hate having to take sides. Harry's been like a brother to me for years... an annoying, insensitive little brother who I know loves me, even if he'll never actually say it, and who needs desperately to be looked after. And you... you mean more to me than I have words for. And I know, I'm being bossy and meddling but I just..." She bit her lip. "I love you, both of you, and I'm scared that one day I'm going to have to choose between you."

"The strange thing is," Snape replied seriously, "I do believe that Black really did care about Potter, he didn't intend to do him harm, but he had a tendency to be - reckless to a degree which went well beyond ordinary Gryffindor stupidity, and into outright insanity. As for Potter and me... to a certain extent it's another 'boy thing,' at least on my part - having someone to snipe at is a sort of masculine amusement, like billiards. But there is... real emotion there as well, and I don't know how to overcome that.

"I did try - I did try, for my part, to set aside my... conditioned reaction to James Potter's bloody smug, gloating face by stripping my memories out into the Pensieve for the duration of the Occlumency sessions - and you know how that turned out. I did my best to deal with Potter as just another student, to speak to him sensibly and give him such information as it was safe for him to know, instead of just keeping him in the dark the way Albus bloody-well does, but he just - threw it back in my face. His hatred and, and scorn for me was so intense that coming into contact with his mind was like a plunge into boiling water - and trust me that I know what that feels like. And he's so - damned - fucking _rude_, all the bloody time!

"I wouldn't mind if - I didn't really care if Lovegood or Longbottom, for example, forgot to call me 'Sir', even before they became my - carers, because I knew they _were_ just being forgetful, or even friendly God help them. But you know, you know as well as I do that when Potter omits any formal mark of respect it's because he means me to know that he doesn't respect me. And that - constant slap in the face, coming from _that_ face, feels as if - as if his bloody father is reaching down through his posterity to go on tormenting me. The bastard is _dead_ and I still can't get free of him." He ran his fingers through his hair, a restless, nervous gesture of displacement. "But if it distresses you - the brat has been at least trying to be polite, since I was - and even though his pity and his guilt give me goosebumps, if it means so much to you I will _try_ to talk to him in a civil manner. But I don't hold out much hope of it lasting - especially once he finds out that you and I are... involved."

She smoothed her fingers through his hair, following his, and nodded. "It sounds like the Occlumency lessons were just as horribly traumatic for you as they were for him," she said softly. "He was always a nervous wreck when he came back to the common room, afterwards, and Ron said he always had nightmares afterwards. The way he described it, you would attack him over and over again, without warning him or explaining to him what was going on, until you got tired of tormenting him and sent him away - and yes, I know that's probably not at all accurate, from your point of view, but that's how it seemed to him.

"I don't know if you've noticed, but one of Harry's few not-insanely-Gryffindor traits is a strong tendency towards paranoia. Which is reasonable enough, since there are quite a lot of people who are, in fact, out to get him." She sighed. "Severus, try to understand... he sees you the same way you saw his father. As someone who wants to hurt him without reason, who despises him for the sin of being himself. I don't think that's accurate, but how amenable would you have been to the idea that James Potter had a good side?"

She smiled ruefully. "As for how he'll take the knowledge that we're... involved; I very rarely use the 'if you love me you'll understand' approach, because it's shallow and manipulative, but I think this might be a good time for it."

"It isn't only Slytherins who are allowed to be manipulative - Albus is a past-master at it. And I _did_ attack the little brute without warning, and more or less without quarter - I told you, when it comes to teaching defence I play rough. A fine teacher I'd be, wouldn't I, if I - mollycoddled him and made him think it was all easy, let him think that in a real situation he would have time to prepare himself, and got him killed by so doing. There _are_ people out to get him - that's why I was bloody well trying to teach him to defend himself, but he didn't want to learn.

"I could hardly have been all sweetness and light to him, knowing that at any moment He - Riddle - could be looking out through the boy's eyes, but perhaps I could have spent more time in each lesson taking him through the, the meditation aspect, teaching him to close his mind before I attacked him and tried to open it again. But why should I have to waste valuable lesson time like that? I _gave_ him the bloody homework which should have enabled him to defend himself against me, and it's not my fault if he was too fucking idle and feckless to do it. I suppose it was something he couldn't actually get you to do for him, so it didn't get done."

Hard lines settled in around his mouth, until he looked as if he had bitten on something bitter. "I don't despise him for being himself - I despise him for being lazy, for being slapdash, for not using the not inconsiderable talents he was born with, for freeloading on you - and it doesn't help him, Hermione, to keep doing so much of his work for him - it just makes him worse, and his laziness could get him killed. It could get the whole bloody wizarding world killed, if Albus's precious prophecy is true. It's already got Black killed - and much as I hated the bastard, I didn't really wish that on him. I despise Potter for just assuming that people will take potentially fatal risks to save him from the consequences of his own reckless stupidity, and then going all weepy about it afterwards but it still won't stop him doing it again, will it? His parents died for him, and he thinks their sacrifice of so little worth that he goes ahead and risks his stupid neck and gets his godfather killed as well.

"And I _don't_ mean by charging into the Ministry, foolish though that was. Since he sincerely believed Black was being tortured that was understandable, if idiotic. But he _knew_ that his mind was in danger from the, the Dark Lord and he preferred to lie to me and keep the, the continuing invasion of his dreams to himself, not even because he didn't trust me to know but just because he was curious about it. And curiosity, in this case, killed the dog. Thanks to Potter's determination to do every bloody stupid, dangerous thing he can think of without calling in adult assistance, Black is dead and I am - _this_." He gestured bitterly at the emptiness where his left arm and his legs should be. "Even if I can be something resembling whole in my body again, with Filius's help, I am never going to be whole in my mind - and all of it just to satisfy Potter's fucking curiosity."

"I did _say_ it wasn't accurate, just that that's how he feels about it," Hermione said patiently. "And you are unfair to him. It wasn't just... curiosity." She pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them, gazing at him thoughtfully. "Imagine that you are Harry, for a moment. You know that You-Know-Who is back, and you've had to face him all alone. You tell people, and most of them don't believe it or actively punish you for telling the truth, over and over. Professor Dumbledore won't speak to you or even look at you directly. Nobody in the Order will tell you what's going on. The only news available is from the _Daily Prophet_, and it's all about you being crazy. You've never needed to be able to defend yourself more, and yet Dolores Umbridge is permitted to remain as the teacher of Defence and nobody else will teach you either. There's a bloody conspiracy to keep you in the dark, when there's an insane madman who wants to murder you and ignorance not only isn't bliss, it's practically murder.

"And then you find out that the nightmares you're having are real, that you actually know what Voldemort is doing sometimes. You know what he's thinking. You finally have a _chance_ at knowing when he'll come after you, maybe even of knowing what he'll do, of not being a sacrificial bloody lamb when the wolf decides to pounce. And then the headmaster who won't even look at you and the teacher who you've never trusted tell you that you have to give that up. You have to go back to being a mushroom, kept in the dark. They want to make you even more helpless, even more ignorant, to keep you in a state of constant terror because you know something's going to happen, you know someone wants to hurt you, but nobody will tell you what's going on. Exactly how cooperative would you have been, at that point? Would you have given up the _only_ way you had of knowing if You-Know-Who was going to come after you, because you were told to by people who you couldn't trust to warn you themselves?

"He was so angry with everyone in fifth year, even me and Ron. He was like a, a tiger in a box, knowing the hunters are outside and all but beating himself senseless against the walls trying to get out, but he couldn't, and nobody would tell him where they were or what was going on, and he just had to sit there and wait for them to get around to killing him..."

"I've spent most of my bloody life waiting for someone to get around to killing me" Snape replied sourly. "But I suppose that at least means I'm used to it. What do you think I was doing but trying to teach him to defend himself? But he refused to learn. Didn't he realize that the channel between himself and - Riddle - was a two-way street: one which the Dark Lord could at any moment come barrelling down like a - like a roaring torrent forcing itself down a brook? I tried to explain the situation to him, as far as Albus would permit, and as far as I dared do with the possibility of _That_ listening in; and if he had only listened and been guided by me I could have taught him how to make that two-way channel one-way only, so that he could hear but not be heard. But he didn't listen to me - he never bloody does."

"Well, no, he doesn't," Hermione said, glad he'd finally got this. "No more than you ever listen to him, really. And of course he wouldn't have understood what you were trying to tell him, you were probably making it too subtle. Harry doesn't understand subtle. He needs things explained in simple terms or he gets confused. I know James was supposed to be some sort of prodigy, but Harry isn't - he _really_ isn't - and you tend to make things too complicated for him. It's not that he's stupid," she added conscientiously. "He's just... uncomplicated. He might grow out of it. But no, I doubt it ever occurred to him that the connection might be two-way, or that there might be any reason besides the vague 'for everyone's safety' for shutting it down. He just doesn't think that way... and he wouldn't tell me most of what was going on, so I couldn't explain it to him."

"He may not be in his mother's league, but as you say, he's not stupid. Is he really just uncomplicated by nature - or is he just too idle to be anything else? Because idle he certainly is - and you don't help matters, Hermione, by spoon-feeding him. It would be different if you insisted on explaining things to him until he understood them, but seeing the remarkable similarity between some of your essays and his I'm sure that at least half the time you just give in and let him copy your work. And that laziness, that tendency to free-load and to look for the easy way out, is going to get him killed - and after spending six years and losing my bloody limbs trying to keep the little bastard alive, I'd take that as a personal affront, and you may tell him I said so. In fact you telling him what I have said might be - productive."

"Oh, believe me, I'll be having a word with him... quite a lot of words, actually, in my most strident tones. Although I won't tell him you said it, because then he'll pout and ignore me. I'll tell him what _I_ think, and remind him precisely how often he's ignored me and been right... not once, as it happens. He'll take it better from me." She grinned ruefully. "He _is_ fundamentally uncomplicated, though... he's been a bit less that way, this year, so I'm hoping it's just that he's a bit young for his age - which he is, he always has been. It can be rather sweet, but it certainly isn't helping to keep him in one piece.

"As for our essays... the similarities aren't always because I let him copy my work. Sometimes it's because he's coaxed me into checking it over for him, and of course I reference my research to correct his. He does at least try to do everything by himself now, though - I put my foot down about letting him and Ron see my work before they'd at least attempted to do it themselves in fourth year. You're right, though, I have to stop helping. It's just hard to resist when they're being cute and coaxy."

"I'm not asking you not to talk to him or the weasel about their homework at all, just - talk them through it and make as certain as you can that they actually understand what you tell them, instead of just nodding their heads and going 'Yeah, yeah Hermione' with that bloody glassy-eyed expression. Think of yourself as my teaching assistant, all right, and damned well _teach_ them. And - I suppose that I sometimes forget that he is very young. He and Longbottom are almost the youngest in their year, just as you are almost the oldest, and sometimes I forget that Potter could as easily be a year lower - just as you could easily be a year higher. And that's not even to consider that adolescent boys tend to be a bit less... mature than their female counterparts in any case." He flashed her one of his there-and-gone smiles. "I know I was. At seventeen I fancied myself as - as some sort of darkly-brooding super-hero: and I suppose I still do!"

He coughed delicately, slightly embarrassed by his own honesty. "Also - I agree, it wouldn't be a good idea to tell him that I said he was lazy and feckless, nor that I blame him for Black's death and for reducing me to... because there's no profit in making him feel even more guilty and miserable than he already does. But I do think you should tell him that I've been bloody-well trying to keep him alive all these years, not to bloody-well kill him, and that it - that I am a real person, with feelings, and that it makes me - angry, to be constantly slapped in the face with his hatred and his scorn for trying to do the best I can for him."

He sighed and smiled at her again, wondering exactly what she found "cute and coaxy", and whether he could manage to do it himself. On him, it would probably just look sinister. "Anyway - what with poor Draco sobbing on my shoulder and the shock of seeing you injured I haven't even had a chance to ask you about the wedding yet."

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**Author's note:**

We were able to do a very fast update on this one because we had most of it written already. Don't get spoilt: the next one will probably take a lot longer! But unless we both get run over by a bus it _will_ be completed, and will run to around 27 chapters.

In fairness to Sirius, he did generally try to give Harry sensible advice and to keep him out of danger - it was only his own safety he was truly careless of. But it was a case of "Don't do as I do, do as I say" and he did rather encourage Harry to model himself on his father - who was nearly as reckless as Sirius himself.

As regards that first, fateful glance between Harry and Snape, if you go to the **Artnatomy** website at **www . artnatomia . net** and select "APPLICATION", "NATURALISTIC MODEL" and "LEVEL II", and then click on the facial expressions for pain and anger, you will see that they are very similar, except that anger results in a more open eye - but it is of course very difficult to assess the eyes of someone who is wearing glasses and who is some distance away.

I have gone back and made minor changes to chapters #05 (_Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make_) and #08 (_What Hermione Did Next_), after realizing that I had omitted to mention a major Slytherin character. There's no need to go back and re-read the whole chapter (unless you really want to): the changes are as follows:

**#05** (after the scene where Pansy and Goyle gatecrash Snape's quarters): The fifteenth visitor was the Bloody Baron, who had once been starved and tortured to death in a dungeon just along the corridor from these very rooms. He drifted through the wall, trailing his bloodstained robes, to hover in the corner, gazing down at his companion in misfortune, his expression unreadable. But then, it generally was.

**#08** (during the Christmas scene): And he had always hated Christmas - had felt like the spectre at the feast, the eternal outsider, congenitally unable to unbend enough to join in the ridiculous jollifications, despite Albus's best efforts. Like the Bloody Baron, perhaps, a real spectre at the feast, dour, taciturn and empty-eyed where he hovered half in and half out of the wall - but he could hardly be an outsider at a party at which he was apparently both host and guest of honour

We are told that the Bloody Baron is pale, gaunt and silent with blank, staring eyes, and is dressed in bloodstained robes - but prior to _Deathly Hallows_ we were never told whether it was his blood or someone else's. I think people usually vaguely assumed that he was "bloody" in the sense of "Bloody Jefferies", the infamous "hanging judge": but he seems on the whole to be a force for order and safety at Hogwarts, not a dangerous monster, and the fact that the Baron is given to "groaning and clanking" in the Astronomy Tower suggested to us that he died in pain and in chains, and that he was the victim of an atrocity instead of (or possibly as well as) the perpetrator. This explanation has now been somewhat canon-shafted, but we are fudging it by assuming that the Grey Lady was fantasizing when she said the Baron was her fatal lover.

I forgot to say, in the notes to the last chapter, that the idea that Salazar Slytherin's objection to Muggle-born students was that he thought the Founders were as much kidnapping them as rescuing them was inspired by the drabble _Misunderstandings_ by **unlikely2**.

One of our readers has suggested that cognitive behavioural therapy would be useful for Snape, or anyone suffering from PTSD, in helping him to control flashbacks and irrational thoughts etc., and hence to feel more in command of himself; although it isn't as important as social support, which he's already got, and anyway it probably wouldn't be possible to arrange it in his case. I've spoken to a friend who is a PTSD expert and his quick response is that although CBT is the most effective treatment (although still not _very_ effective), in his opinion CBT is really just fancy medical-speak for talking it through with somebody steady, with some sensible problem-solving included. I haven't been able to discuss it with him properly because his e-mail address has been "undergoing migration" and has only just come back up - more in-depth comments will have to wait for next time. But he thought that Snape was unlikely to think that he would get anything out of seeing a stranger, however experienced, that he wouldn't get out of talking to Hermione and Minerva in an evironment where he feels safe and comfortable.

((Which is not to say that people with PTSD shouldn't seek treatment, because many people don't _have _somebody really calm and unshockable to talk it through with, plus with a professional you don't have to feel guilty about imposing on them, because that's what they're paid for.))

This chapter has been re-edited to comply with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_. The main change is that Snape's Patronus is now a solid-looking silver doe, rather than a wavering phoenix, and the conversation about Patronuses has had to be substantially re-written. Other than that, there is more emphasis on the fact that Harry's mother was Snape's friend, and a reference to Sirius having lured Snape to the Shrieking Shack after the underpants incident has been removed.


	17. 15 Crawl Before You Can Walk

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

You thought the last chapter was long...?

**N.B.:** In my haste to get both this and a new chapter of _Sons of Prophecy_ out before Christmas I am posting this without the usual thorough proof-reading. If anyone spots any typoes, do let me know.

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**15: CRAWL BEFORE YOU CAN WALK**

Harry was perfectly capable of moving Hermione out of his way. He was a lot bigger than she was, these days, and he could probably lift her with one arm if he really tried. But he wouldn't, and she knew he wouldn't, which was why bailing him up against a window had worked so well.

"Harry Potter, I am _ashamed_ of you."

He squirmed, unable to meet her eyes. "I didn't... well, I did mean to, but I didn't know..."

"You knew it was someone else's memory you were poking your nose into."

"Yes, but..." Harry shuffled his feet. "I thought it was - you know - war stuff. Not... not personal."

"But it was. And you didn't even apologize, did you?"

"No." Harry hunched his shoulders, looking as if he was trying to pull his head into them like a tortoise. "Did he tell - "

"He didn't have to tell me you didn't apologize. I know you." She poked him in the chest.

"Why should I have to apologize, anyway? They were all lying to me, keeping secrets from me - Snape knew what Voldemort was after, why I kept having that dream, but he didn't warn me -" Harry, backed into a corner, had turned from penitent to defensive in the sudden way he often did.

"How can you say that? You know he was taking a risk teaching you at all. If V-Voldemort had looked through you and seen him telling you about the prophecy he'd have - he'd have done what he did do, only sooner." Hermione did not simulate distress or weep crocodile tears. She thought that sort of behaviour was disgusting and immoral. Allowing herself to cry when she really wanted to, instead of squashing the urge as she would normally try to, wasn't at all the same thing. "After everything he's been through... not just after he was captured but before, all the suspicion and resentment..." Her eyes stung and her vision blurred.

The defiance drained out of Harry like water out of a sieve. He hated to see her cry. "Hermione, don't, please..."

"Don't what?" She sniffed. "Don't expect better from you than to behave like a... a spoiled little brat who hurts other people and doesn't care at all?"

"I - I didn't mean to hurt him. If I'd realized..."

"What did you think he'd feel like? He's a real person, Harry, not some sort of, of thing." She could feel the tears threatening to start up again.

"It's not that I don't care, honestly..." He patted awkwardly at her shoulder. "I just... I should have apologized, I know that. It was just a bit of a shock, seeing something like that. Did he, uhm, tell you what it was that I saw?"

"No." Hermione wiped her eyes on her sleeve. "And he was really surprised that you hadn't. He thought we'd all have been having a good laugh at his expense, and he was really surprised that you hadn't thought it was funny and you hadn't told anyone."

"Of course I didn't tell anyone!" Harry sounded miserable. "I didn't want... it was bad enough _I_ knew my dad was... was a bully and worse. I didn't want anyone else to know. Everyone always says I'm so like him, and I didn't..."

Hermione nodded, pushing back the remaining tears. Harry was always being compared to his father, and finding out that said father was some sort of awful thug must have come as a fairly nasty shock. "I do understand that, Harry. But you could have apologized. Or written a note or something."

"Yeah." Harry imitated a tortoise again. "I just... you know. He hates me."

"And you hate him."

"I did then, yeah." Harry sighed. "Not now. Not after... you know."

"I do know." Hermione relented enough to pat his arm gently. "Better late than never, though."

Harry looked at her as if she'd suggested he swallow a live frog. "Do I have to?"

"No. You can go on being a selfish git if you like."

He sighed. "That's not... well, all right, it is fair, but it isn't nice. Anything else you want to say while you're scolding me?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

This delicate, tentative attempt at an even vaguely sexual relationship was wonderful to him, fragile and perfect in the light of day - but at night, at night sometimes when the dreams stacked up like storm-clouds waiting to rain on his personal parade, then the remembered touch of Hermione's lips on his only served to remind him that he was dirty and useless, a house broken open and ruined, free for any thief to soil and ravage as they pleased.

The events of the previous summer lay like a great raw, red wound across his memory. Before and even at the time it had been largely undifferentiated, a single confused mass of savage pain, of hunger and exhaustion and sickening dread, but as his mind knitted itself back together and the world came more into focus so individual spikes of memory, a series of vivid little set-piece horrors, began to rise to the surface at unexpected moments, even when he was fully awake and by daylight - and suddenly seeing Draco like that last night, jarring loose the memory of himself twitching and jerking in agony in front of the boy's horrified face, had accelerated the process, like a chain dragging up rot and seaweed from the ocean floor, and there was - he could feel it - a little shudder of panic running through his heartbeat all the time, now, even when he was nominally calm. All of which explained what he was doing here rocking and whimpering, his fine linen shirt drenched with sweat, trying to stifle his own moans with a fist pressed hard against his teeth as the excruciating echo of that agony crawled along his nerves and Bellatrix's inane giggles rang in his ears.

He could hardly hear anything beyond the memory of her voice; panic had set his blood-pressure climbing so high that his ears were ringing with it, and he could hardly hear Longbottom's steady and steadying voice but he remembered - he remembered that Longbottom had as much reason to dread the sound of Bellatrix's viciously corrupted, jeering baby-talk as he had, and in a sudden surge of fellow-feeling he made a grab for the boy and held him close, closing his eyes and letting Neville rock him and pat him awkwardly on the back.

He swallowed and swallowed again, sweat prickling on his skin as he fought not to vomit on the boy's shoulder. But he could feel Longbottom's steady hand scooping the hair back from his face and from the back of his neck, letting the cool air get at his skin, and after a few minutes the kindness in the touch, as much as the coolness, smoothed away the worst of the panic and he was able to draw away and sit with his head bowed, shuddering. Neville got up, placid and unruffled, fetched a damp flannel from the bathroom and came back to sit beside the older man on the couch, wiping the cool cloth across his forehead and the back of his neck. Snape took it from him with a small nod and pressed it to his face, breathing deeply. "Thank you," he said gruffly, after a moment - although actually saying it still went against the grain.

"That's all right, sir."

"No it's bloody not all right." He turned his face away, letting the long hair flop back down to hide his features. "You wanted a - a father substitute, though God knows why you should think I'd fit the bill - and instead - " He made a sudden, violent gesture, raking at his own skin, at his empty shoulder, and almost overbalanced, so that Neville had to catch hold of him again to keep him from ending up on the floor.

"Hush now. Hush."

Snape shook his head jerkily. "I need - I can't - ah, God! I can't - can't get away from myself, dirty - can't get clean, you shouldn't - I did - did as I was fucking told. No one should want to be near me."

"So I always knew I was no-one." He folded down to sit on the floor at - what would have been his friend's feet, if he hadn't been maimed of them, and took the other man's thin hand in both of his. "Look at me now, sir, please. Professor?" After a moment Snape did so, his eyes bleak with shame, and Neville gave him an equally bleak little smile. "It's not as if I'm not - I'm _used_ to the idea of a f-father as somebody - damaged. At least you can talk. And listen."

"There is that. Ten thousand useful facts about the uses of Old Man's Beard..." He swallowed convulsively.

"Would you like me to...? I know this really good tea, see, made with Rosebay Willowherb, and it would just - just calm you a bit, like, when you're feeling - excitable."

"You mean when I'm bloody p-panicking like some - hysterical bloody little yappy lapdog. When I can't - live in my own skin, because it feels so - "

"I find with those little dogs, when they have hysterics it's usually because they're trying to chew your ankles off."

Snape gave a little snort at that. "Many people would say that that was appropriate."

"They would, wouldn't they?" Neville said cheerfully. He gave the scarred hand a careful little pat. "You're not dirty, really you're not. That's just - just them messing with your head, like."

"I wish my head was _all_ they'd bloody messed with. They used to - everybody used to call me - greasy, because my skin - now it feels as if they're right. As if I had - layer of dirt, contamination, all the time."

"Shush. Nobody else thinks like that, they all... it's like my parents. You know."

"A martyr to the bloody cause? I wish I could feel more - heroic, but I told - told - "

"My parents tried to talk," Neville said in a remote voice. "They didn't know the answers to what that Lestrange - woman - wanted to find out, so it was no good, but if they'd known, they would have told her. While they could still remember how. And that was only after a few hours, and they were - were Aurors."

"Are Aurors so much greater than lesser mortals, that you think they should have been able to - to hold out longer than I bloody did?"

"No but - I mean, that was their job. They were paid to be in danger. You were just - doing it because you thought it was the right thing to do."

"Somebody had to do it, and I seemed to be the only bloody candidate. And I had - a guilt to expiate."

"You didn't run away, though."

"Can't bloody run away now, can I? Can't even bloody _walk_ away very slowly with an affectation of bloody nonchalance. That's - "

"I know what it means. I'm not thick, you know: I just look it."

"Sorry, I'm sorry, I shouldn't - burden you with this. Any of you."

"It's not a burden, it's - nice to be able to help, see."

"Yes, I do - see," and he thought that he did. The boy had grown up wanting to help his real parents and not being able to, but now he had something on which to act out his fantasies of rescue. "I'm sorry that you had to get stuck with - that you couldn't help your parents."

"I wish I could help them, but you're not - look, helping you, it's like poking Bellatrix in the eye, isn't it, and that's - nice, but you're not a, a substitute for anything. You're dead interesting when you're not snarling at people, and helping you - it's work, isn't it, I mean satisfying work, like coaxing a plant to grow, and people don't think a, a rare plant's got less rare or less valuable just because it's lost bits. They just... look after it more. When you were first... when you were so ill, it was dead cool, seeing you starting to remember stuff and getting your strength back and being able to sit up and all, and thinking that I helped."

"If I'm a plant I've been bloody comprehensively - pruned." He pulled a face. "I don't know whether the comparison is flattering or not, since I don't know what plant you had in mind. I refuse to be considered a vegetable of any kind, but I could certainly see myself as a Venomous Tentacula... And I'm glad you - that you derive some job-satisfaction from this - debacle."

"I'm not sure what one of those is, but - yeah. I'm sure Hermione feels the same - you know how she does love to fuss over people - and I know for a fact that Luna says helping to put you right is like restoring a piece of art."

"Something by Francis Bacon, perhaps."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Potter," Draco said stiffly. "Could I have a word?"

"Yeah - 'push off'," Ron muttered under his breath. "That's a word."

"That's two words, Weasley - or can't you count to two?"

"Stop it, both if you!" Hermione snapped, as Ron started to surge to his feet. "Yes, what is it Draco?"

Draco looked down at his shoes, scuffing restlessly at the stone flags of the courtyard. "I just wanted to say - " he muttered. "He - my godfather - he said - said it was you that thought of using Muggle techniques to keep him alive. You and Granger. Said he'd have died, otherwise. So I just wanted to - well - thanks. That's all."

"That's OK," Harry said awkwardly. "I don't - I mean, I know we've never - but seeing him like that - "

"Yes."

"Is Snape really your godfather?"

"'Professor Snape' to you, Potter - and yes, he is. What of it?"

"Nothing. It just - explains a lot, I guess." After a moment he shuffled his behind aside and patted the stone step next to him, for Draco to sit down. The blond boy did so, rather stiffly.

"So, ah - Hermione told me you'd decided to..."

"To give up being a trainee Death Eater and become a trainee virgin sacrifice instead?"

"Well, yeah - something like that."

"I heard," Hermione said brightly, "that you're going to be taking over most of Madam Pomfrey's shifts to sit with Se - with Professor Snape?"

"That's the idea, yes: it's a problem for her being away from the hospital wing so much, now that Quidditch practice has picked up for the big summer match, and especially with Flitwick being away. But I'm afraid that - well, seeing me unexpectedly, I mean if he wakes up suddenly, it could disturb him, so I'm going to have to make sure I look as unlike my father as possible - not that that's any bloody loss. I'll have to keep my hair short, and wear - not school robes, because they were at school together. What do Muggles wear? Whatever it is, at least I can be sure my father would never wear that."

"At our age?" Harry said. "Well - T-shirt and jeans, mostly."

"Which are?"

"Well - jeans are like - sort-of workmen's trousers, quite tight and made out of this dull blue stuff. With pockets, and zips and things. T-shirts are like an ordinary shirt with short sleeves, except they don't have a collar or openings or things - they're stretchy, and you just pull them over your head. And they have, um, slogans on them, usually. Or funny sayings."

"Sounds ghastly - what am I supposed to do with my hair while I'm dragging this stretchy atrocity on over it?"

"Doesn't matter if you're going to cut it really short, does it? And if you're going to, um, stay the night with him the way Hermione and Neville do, you'll need to sleep in something your father wouldn't, too." He grinned. "Maybe something in baby blue, with bunnies on the pockets."

"Wouldn't work," Draco muttered, scowling. "My father _does_ wear - shut up, Weasel. It's not that bloody funny."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

By now, Severus rarely needed to be actively held during the day, except when the flashbacks overwhelmed his senses and threatened his still-fragile sanity: but he still preferred to be touching someone - sitting shoulder to shoulder, or holding hands. It was not so much, now, that he needed the contact to remind him of where he was, but that the knowledge that someone was willing to be near him held back the aching sorrow which he despised in himself, scorning it as mere self-pity although somehow that didn't make it any easier to abolish it.

At least now he no longer had to fret about Draco's safety, only about his exam prospects; and the boy's furious declarations of vengeance against anyone connected with his torture were as touching and amusing as they were worrying - though it was probably just as well that he didn't yet know about the involvement of Cormac McLaggen and his as-yet unidentified associates. It was nearly a week since the giant squid had confirmed that McLaggen's partners in crime were probably still at Hogwarts; two weeks since Snape had viewed his own torture in the Pensieve. If they had had a clear record of both girls speaking they could - at the cost of some resentment and disruption - have locked the school and then interrogated every girl and every squeaky-voiced schoolboy on the premises, to see if their voices matched those of his tormentors. But since they had nothing but a laugh to go on for one of them, Albus hoped to be able to identify the one who had spoken without alerting her, so that she could be watched to see who her associates were.

Minerva had come whey-faced and shaken from viewing the Pensieved memory, to admit that the voice sounded familiar but not familiar enough to place. Pomona, subdued but certain, insisted that it was none of her Hufflepuffs. Severus himself was fairly sure it wasn't a Slytherin, although his memory was still so riddled (or perhaps Riddled) with holes that he couldn't be as certain as Pomona. On principle, however, he objected to the assumption that Slytherin was the most likely place to look for a Death Eater, even though he knew there was at least some truth in it.

That left Ravenclaw as the main candidate, but Filius Flitwick was away, schmoozing a distant goblin cousin in Aberystwyth in the hopes of gaining entry to the Lestrange family vault at Gringotts which might, just possibly, hide Helga Hufflepuff's cup, and Snape was reluctant to have him recalled halfway through such a delicate and vital task. He had done quite enough damage to the cause already when he spilled his secrets to the Dark One, and it was enough, for his safety, to know that no Ravenclaw should be allowed near him.

Except for Lovegood, of course. He contemplated, as one might contemplate the suggestion that the moon really _was_ made of green cheese, the idea that Lovegood might be his tormentor, but it was impossible to make it fit - even for a professional paranoic like himself. On the contrary, he considered asking her to view the Pensieved memory and try if she could identify the speaker as one of her housemates; but with over seventy female Revenclaws to choose from the odds were good that Luna, who was not much of a social animal, wouldn't recognize the voice anyway; and he was reluctant to subject her to such a horrific scene when there was only a small chance of success.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Surely a - an Occlumens like you could re-direct your thoughts, stop yourself from falling into these - inappropriate episodes of self-loathing? If not then - well, Adrian talked about Muggle methods of learning to limit - harmful ideas."

"I don't doubt that I could, Poppy," he replied rather waspishly, "with or without your little case-conferences on my behalf. It's just that I don't care to."

"Why not?" she asked bluntly.

He turned his face aside and looked down, letting his hair fall forwards. "Because when I get into that - that mood," he muttered, "then I believe that I deserve my own loathing, my own disgust. I more than half do anyway."

"Severus - " She looked at him rather helplessly. "I can't believe that - you must know that you've more than atoned for your earlier mistakes, long since, and you are not - not to blame in any way for what they chose to do to you. Whatever - whatever form that - brutality took, it reflects on them, not on you."

"It's not that... well, not only that. But it still - hurts - I can _feel_ them hurting me, they're in my head and I can't get them out and you know that I do still... My joints ache, my muscles and my nerves still feel half raw, a lot of the time, even with all your potions, and when I'm in pain it - Longbottom was here this morning and I had to bite my own hand to stop myself from falling into that - babbling hysteria again, and begging him not to hurt me."

"You know that if you had, it would not diminish you in his eyes, or in mine."

He pulled a wry, flinching face. "Only because I could hardly sink any lower."

"Severus, look at me." When he did so she reached out with her left hand, very gently, and touched the side of his face, running her thumb along the scar that stretched from the corner of his mouth almost to his ear. "We all see - these are badges of honour, not of shame."

"It's - kind of you to say so," he muttered, and she tsk'd at him irritably.

"It's the truth, Severus. You really must stop punishing yourself - as if you hadn't already been punished enough."

"Oh, if it will stop you _nagging_ me: that's really too much punishment, even for me." He flashed her a tight, flinching smile. "Longbottom wanted to feed me some herbal concoction he said would stop me feeling so 'excitable', as he kindly put it. But I'm not sure I'm quite that suicidal..."

"Come, now. He may be a sort of one-man mobile catastrophe where potions are concerned, but when it comes to purely herbal concoctions, not involving actual magic, the boy's a natural."

"Yes - but a natural _what_?"

"Don't be any more aggravating than you can help, there's a good lad."

Later on, lying curled protectively together in warmth and darkness, she murmured: "I'm going to miss this," into the fall of silky black hair. Severus stirred in his sleep and sighed, and she tightened her arm around him.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

He took the tea, in the end, though his long nose twitched suspiciously over it, like a rat's nose, and he muttered sourly about the taste which, in truth, was not unpleasant, if a little bitter.

"Rosebay - Rosebay Willowherb, I mean, Rosebay's something else - well, it's good stuff," Neville said earnestly. "Good for your health and it's really - well, uh, soothing without being sedating."

"What else is in here? Valerian - there's _no_ mistaking that - Chamomile... St John's Wort."

"You can tell that just from sniffing it?"

"I have to put this bloody nose to _some_ bloody use. Sniffing out poisons and potions is about all it's good for."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that, sir." Neville gave him a long, considering look. "If you ever get bored with teaching," he said, choosing to ignore Snape's hollow laugh, "you could have a great future as a wine taster."

"Do you know that's - that's actually not a bad idea." He let the bitter taste of the tea soak through him, and found that it did, to a degree, soothe away the cold persistent shudder which had turned his insides to ice.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"That's it now, come on!" Hooch cried, in a bright voice like somebody encouraging a not-very-intelligent pony, and Snape glared at her under his hair and considered telling her to sod off. But the faster he learned to walk again, the sooner he could be free of these irritatingly jolly gymnastic excrescences, so he took a deep breath, let go of the stone bench and managed three wavering, unsupported steps before he had to grab hold of Hooch's outstretched hands and lean on her heavily.

"Damnit!" he said rather breathlessly, as Hooch steered him to sit down on the edge of the bed. "I can't - "

"Don't worry about it, Severus. These things take time, and you are getting better."

Although he was perversely reluctant to admit it, privately he knew she was right. He might still be as wobbly and prone to collapse as a liquorice crutch but the more he practised walking - if you could call it that - the more he could feel what was left of the muscles around his left hip beginning to live and to move again. Even if he could still manage no more than a stiff-legged shuffle, swinging the prosthetic leg forwards without bending the knee. He could believe, now, at least, that he would some day be able to shamble adequately through his life like Sylvanus Kettleburn, although whether he would ever regain the silken stalk which had terrorised nearly a whole generation of nervous first-years was another matter.

"At least I didn't actually end up on my arse this time" he muttered, rubbing at the pseudo-muscles of his artificial right calf, and enjoying the sensation of _having_ sensation below the knee; even if it did still feel a little odd and half numb, so that it quickly became irritating if he tried to wear it for extended periods.

Behind him, he thought he heard Rolanda murmur, very quietly, "And such a nice arse, too..." Ignoring the blush which he could feel creeping in around the edges he cocked a long, sardonic eyebrow at her, and she grinned back unrepentantly.

It was only much later that it occurred to him that as he overbalanced he had reached out and grabbed Hooch's hands with both of his, the natural and the prosthetic, without having to think about it.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"It's important to remember that Darkness in that sense is to some extent a matter of context. It's what you do with it that counts - as they say. There are some spells which are - intrinsically vicious, in their casting or in their effects, but there are others... Many Dark spells call for the blood shed from a fatal wound, or - or from a rape, and you might say they are evil without qualification. Yet I know of no spell which requires the caster to have shed the blood in question, and one might come across a person who had been murdered or - and take a sample of their blood without doing any further harm, and use it in a spell to bring their attacker to justice. And where would be the Darkness in that? It would be... sinister, I suppose, but hardly evil.

"On the other hand - the potion which was used to make me... more responsive to sensation was invented for use by lovers, or persons suffering from neurological disorders, or craftsmen doing finely detailed work. The spell which kept me awake and aware for four bloody interminable months was devised to treat narcolepsy and _petit mal_, the potions which enabled them to keep me alive without fucking feeding me were intended for use in times of famine and the curse which can force the soul to stay in a body too savaged to support it was adapted, in fact, from a good and useful healing spell used to keep accident victims alive until help could get to them. A spell which has saved countless lives - including mine, in the event. Yet, in the wrong hands, all of these became - in the most literal sense - instruments of torture."

He sighed and rubbed tiredly at his eyes. "Here endeth the lesson for today, I think. I want to get you started on Occlumency, but that I think had better wait for another session; I confess I'm flagging. Tell me what you've been up to: it's all of thirty-six hours since you last gave me a proper update on your activities."

"Well..." She pulled a wry face. "I talked to Harry. Overall I think I made an impression on him - especially when I cried at him, he's hardly ever seen me do that - but then we got into another argument about the Half-Blood Prince and - "

"The WHAT?"

"Oh, it's this old Potions-text he's got, that someone called the Half-Blood Prince has written in - notes about making changes to the recipes, stuff like that. He thinks it's wonderful, he practically sleeps with the rotten thing," she said, rolling her eyes; "and he's getting an entirely undeserved reputation for being good at Potions..." she added sulkily. She didn't like to be so obviously outshone in class at the best of times, and it really galled her to know she was being bested by a cheater - and one she couldn't even publicly expose without ruining their friendship.

"Good God - where did he get that old thing from?"

"Professor Slughorn gave it to him after he spilled acid on his own copy... it was one of the old spares in the Potions classroom." She sniffed. "Whoever wrote in it was very good at potions, I admit... but Harry isn't, he's just using the book to make it look like he is. And there are a lot of unauthorized spells written in the margins, and he _will_ keep trying them out on people... Poor Ron got hung upside down by his foot at six in the morning, and goodness knows what some of the others do. I keep telling him it's dangerous, but he thinks the Prince is wonderful, he won't hear a thing against him..."

Snape choked slightly, and tried to turn it into a cough. "And he, ah - he admires the person who wrote in the book? Not just the - the information it contains, but the person himself?"

"If it _was_ a him. I keep telling him, for all we know it could have been a girl."

"Oh, it was a him all right. And, ah - what do you think about the Half-Blood Prince?" he asked, trying to sound casual.

Hermione scowled. "I don't like him," she said firmly. Then she gave him a sheepish look. "He's better than I am at Potions," she muttered. "And some of the spells are... a bit dangerous, or at least rather nasty. But... honestly, what I hate most is that he doesn't do it like it says in the book, and he's RIGHT. I don't like losing, I don't like losing to someone who's being helped to cheat, and I really don't like it when not doing what you're told turns out to be right. And I REALLY don't like it when someone starts telling that to Harry, because you know what he's like. No wonder he thinks the Prince is wonderful, he's damned well encouraging him!"

"You have to learn, you know," he said mildly, "that just because something is printed in a textbook, that doesn't prove that it is right. Only that it was what the person who wrote the textbook thought was right, to the best of their necessarily subjective knowledge and at that point in time. The progress of knowledge absolutely depends on demonstrating that what was in the previous generation's authoritative textbook is wrong, or at best incomplete.

"Ordinarily, I would advise students to stick to what is in the textbook because students are... students, and their ideas are unlikely to improve on those of the previous generation's experts. But sometimes, if a student is very... gifted, they may surpass their tutors and come up with something both original and inspired. Longbottom, for example, has some extremely original and interesting ideas in the Herbology field..."

Hermione made a face. "I'm not good at being original or inspired," she admitted unhappily. "I like for there to be rules. I don't _like_ to try to change things. It... allows for failure." She hung her head. "Which is very childish, now that I think about it, but... I hate to fail. I hate being seen to fail even worse."

"I know how it is to live in fear of humiliation, believe me," Snape said quietly. "And I hate to fail too. But not to use your abilities to the full _is_ to fail, and you could be so much more than just a, a talking text-book. You are capable of being inspired, I think. You proved that when you blackmailed the Skeeter woman - oh yes, I saw that in your memories - and you proved it doubly when you thought of using the unicorn to save me; when you saw that the human circulatory system could be classed as a container full of liquid. But you allow your fear to hobble you.

"That was why I... that was why I used to get so angry with you in class - jumping up and down like a puppy waving your hand, 'Me sir, me sir,' and then when I asked you you'd give me some damned rote-learned answer straight out of the text-book when I knew, I _knew_ that you were too like me for that to be all there was to you, I _knew_ that you could have given me something that was real and yours if you'd only tried, and that in your own way you were being just as bloody lazy as Potter."

He frowned at her offended look. "I'm sorry, but you were. If Potter had given me a text-book answer I would have been pleased with that, because it would have meant he was working to the best of his limited abilities and was at least trying to stretch himself - but a text-book answer from you meant that you weren't stretching yourself at all." He looked away from her, his expression unreadable. "Did you really think that the Half-Blood Prince and his spells were - nasty? As compared, say, with the Weasley twins and theirs?"

Hermione tackled the easier question first, wanting to put off thinking about the rest as long as possible. "Almost as bad as the twins, I think... I mean, I don't know whether he tested any of his on poor little first years or not - they _did_, you know, with the Skiving Snackboxes, I had to threaten to tell their mother to make them stop. And they did some very nasty things to people they really didn't like, Slytherins mostly... and as far as I know, the worst the Half-Blood Prince did was come up with a spell for hanging people upside-down. Not nice, certainly, but not in the same league as giving a Ton-Tongue Toffee to a Muggle, however richly he might deserve it. So not quite as bad as the twins, no."

She looked down at her hands, twisting her fingers unhappily. "And, well, I'm... more confident, with a textbook answer to fall back on. If it turns out to be wrong, then it's not really my fault. And you're right, it's a failing, and I can do better, but... what if I do worse?" She made a face. "I hate this. You make me drag out my own cowardice and confront it. And I am a coward, I know that. I'm afraid of taking risks intellectually, physically, romantically... I was almost sick after I kissed you, that first time on the cheek, because I was so bloody terrified that I'd made an irredeemable fool of myself in front of the one person who I wanted most to approve of me."

"I suppose we must both be glad that you didn't actually throw up on me" he said lightly. "That would have been - something of a passion-killer on both sides, I imagine. And you did it, which is what counts. You did the thing you were afraid of, and risked the failure - and inexplicable as it still seems to me, you seem to think that what you got as a result was worth it. 'Nothing ventured, nothing gained', remember? If you take the intellectual risks as well, I promise you that your gains will be worth the occasional failure.

"And you're no more of a bloody coward than I am. I used to hear the students whispering and giggling behind my back about why I was so thin and pale and, and greasy, and speculating that I might be a vampire, but really it was because I was so bloody _frightened_ all the time, especially after - after He returned to His loyal bloody followers in the flesh - that I was... sweating with nerves, all the bloody time, and I could hardly keep anything down. Every bloody summons, I used to bloody-well throw up - with terror beforehand, and horror afterwards.

"And - " He stopped and bit his lip, looking away from her again. He was a bloody coward, he was so afraid of seeing distaste or disapproval turning those warm brown eyes cold to him. But it had to be done, he was a liar and a deceiver if he didn't, and he'd been a liar and a deceiver all his life but he didn't mean to be one to her. And perhaps she could still like the man, even if, like everybody else, she would have despised the boy. He forced himself to look up and meet her eyes. "I should be grateful," he said, with a forced and entirely unconvincing attempt at levity, "that you don't think I was _quite_ as unpleasant and irresponsible as Gred and Forge."

It took Hermione a moment to work out what he meant, and when she did her jaw dropped. "You mean you wrote... and Harry... oh, my," she said weakly. Then she giggled. "You know, I don't feel quite so bad about you being better than I am at Potions, I'm used to that... and oh, I want to be there when Harry finds out that he and Ron have been marvelling at how wonderful _you_ are all this time! They love that book, you know, they think the Half-Blood Prince is marvellous. And since it _was_ you, I can rather see the necessity for the spells. I mean, I was imagining someone like Harry's dad or something, who liked pushing people around, but I've always been a strong proponent of defensive hexing... well, at my size, it's not as if I can fight any other way."

She leaned over to kiss him, because he was giving her a rather peculiar look. "And you're not a coward," she said firmly. "Being frightened doesn't make you a coward, it makes you bright enough to know you're in danger. You went anyway, and you didn't break down or run away or anything, and that makes you one of the very bravest people I've ever met." She kissed him again. "And you do look rather better now that you're eating regularly... you're still awfully pale, though. You need sunlight. I wonder if we could get one of those magic window things put in down here? You could get sunshine through that without having to go out."

"I do get a certain amount of sun in here in the morning - but perhaps not enough. In some respects... You know I don't like the idea of going out and being - being seen as the cripple I am. It's not so bad sitting up in bed or on the couch, but being seen publicly in a wheelchair, somehow... quite apart from the security aspects. But after five months this room is beginning to pall, rather. Perhaps I could sit up for a few hours in one of Pomona's greenhouses, when she isn't actually using them for classes, and Longbottom could show me his latest botanical monstrosity - or I could even visit Hagrid, perhaps, when the weather is warmer, and sit out in his vegetable garden and drink beer. I don't suppose I need to worry about security with that - Buckbeak or Weather-wing or whatever he's calling the brute now in the vicinity.

"And - I'm glad, very glad, that you don't blame me for my - childhood interest in hexes. The thing about Levicorpus - well, people were always on the lookout for Expelliarmus, but I found if you hoicked them up by the heel they tended to drop their wands anyway, and I did get a certain malicious satisfaction out of it. You didn't ask about the name," he added, pulling a face. "Prince was my mother's family name, and I thought, 'I may be less than a half-blooded wizard, but at least I can be half a Prince' and at the same time the Princes were such a - a bunch of snobby bastards, disowning Mums because she married a Muggle, that I really wanted to rub their snooty noses in it. Plus I thought it sounded like a good name for a hero. Stupid little twit."

He grinned suddenly. "And you're right: the idea of Potter and Weasley waxing lyrical about how wonderful I am without knowing it is bloody marvellous. When shall we tell them?"

"After he's apologized - which he's going to - and had time to relax and think the worst is over. Then we can casually drop it on them." Harry really _liked_ 'the Prince'. It might even soften his resentment a bit. "It's not a bad name, actually... I mean, especially compared to what teenage boys generally come up with... or most of the Batman characters." She gave him her best adorably pleading look. "And... can I go with you, if you go out? I'd understand if you're not ready to be seen together in public, yet, but I'd really like to go with you. I could probably manage something a bit more dignified than a wheelchair, too... a nice tastefully regal floating chair, perhaps, that you can wave from if you do see anyone."

"I don't think I'm up to regal waving, really I'm not - the idea of being in this state and being - looked at by more than a handful of close friends at a time still feels too... humiliating. Threatening. A fine lot of good it would do to my reputation, wouldn't it, if I curled up in a ball and started screaming in bloody public? Perhaps if a party of my most trusted Slytherins walked with me I could feel... I could kid myself that I really was a prince, with an honour guard, and not just this - helpless, mewling - " He rubbed his hand distractedly across his forehead, pushing his hair out of his eyes, and muttered "Shit" to himself.

Hermione reached out to him, anxious and concerned, and he caught her hand and raised it to his lips in a suitably courtly manner. "And of course you may come. We don't need to tell them all, just yet, that we are - I believe that the correct term is 'dating' - but I should think that the whole school knows that you're part of the little team that has the delightful task of holding me while I scream my bloody guts out anyway. I shouldn't think anybody will blink or query it if you get to go with me and literally hold my hand, and it would be - nice, I think, to doze in the sun surrounded by greenery, with your arms around me. About as unlike - as unlike being there as it could get."

She smiled, brushing her fingertips gently over his lips. "I would like that very much myself," she agreed softly. "And I'm sure Professor Sprout could arrange an untenanted greenhouse... preferably one without any dangerously grabby plants. And maybe some flowers." She drew him close, kissing his forehead gently. "And if anyone does show up, I'll put an illusion on you until they go away, so they can't see you. You'd make a lovely rosebush... the incredibly thorny kind, with the tiny, dark-red roses that smell wonderful. You always do smell good, you know... even when you were doing your very best vampire impression, you smelled like herbs... and occasionally armadillo bile, but that probably wasn't _your_ fault."

"No, that was Longbottom - he spilled a jar of the stuff all down my second-best working robes. And if I'm to be a rose with thorns," he said lightly, "then you shall be a flowering lilac - a really _bushy_ one. Although the idea of one of my students actually _smelling_ me like a rose is - unnerving. Flattering, but unnerving. If people are going to go around sniffing me I can see I shall have to be more careful about having a shower every day, in future, even if - even if my thorns will always keep most people from getting close enough to touch."

"Well, if you will loom like that over them, they're going to be able to smell you. It can be quite distracting, you know... there you are, being all sardonic and dismissive, and standing really close and smelling good... for a girl who already rather likes you, it's a definite attention-getter." She grinned rather naughtily. "And should you ever want to be absolutely certain that you smell nice, I'd be happy to join you in those showers... for quality control purposes." Then she blushed, because while she thought those things a lot, she was usually too embarrassed to say them aloud.

"Part of me - part of me finds that idea quite attractive" he said seriously, then grinned wryly. "Best not to ask me which part. Kissing you... kissing you is already - " He sat up straighter, so that he could look Hermione in the eyes, and made a strange, open gesture with his hand, half hopeless and half yearning. Hermione looked back at him, equally serious, and as he put his fingers under her chin to tilt her face she opened her mouth and leaned into his kiss.

After a minute or two he broke away, shuddering, shut his eyes and tucked his face down against her shoulder. "Sometimes - sometimes when I'm with you, particularly when I'm kissing you, I feel so - not just not bad but actively happy, much more so than I was before - _before_. But I can never tell when it - when the memory, the awareness of what I am, of what they reduced me to, is going to open up under me like - as if the ground suddenly fell away under my feet. If I still had any fucking feet.

"So... on one level I can think of only a few things nicer than sharing a shower with you, and several of the others would also involve getting undressed! But on another level I'm afraid that the knowledge that I was being seen, naked, or the sensation of being touched on bare skin in an even vaguely sexual context might suddenly send me into a screaming panic or, worse, cause me to lash out and hurt you. And I do know that if we are actually going to... progress with this whatever-it-is we have at present, I'm really going to have to try to overcome this - but I'm not sure how to even start, and the idea of doing so is as terrifying as it is attractive."

"I find the idea that it's as attractive as it is terrifying encouraging, though," she murmured, holding him gently. "And... well, we could always start slowly, with the bare skin, and try to... to get you used to it. I won't take it personally if you... don't react well, at first, but we can try..." She slid her hand up to cup the back of his neck gently, under his hair. This much, at least, she knew he could handle, especially while he was being held. "Would you like to? Try, I mean? I would..." She laughed ruefully. "I not only wouldn't object, I'd be positively delighted, if your hand wandered a little."

He nodded quickly and rather unsteadily - Hermione could feel the gesture against her shoulder, even though he made no sound. After a moment he murmured "Lie down with me, then" and she let him draw her down sideways to lie face to face with him. His eyes were shut and he wore an expression of forced calm, but his breathing was short and shallow. Another moment, and she felt him slide his hand under the edge of her shirt, and his long fingers splayed and pressed gently against the bare skin of her back.

Hermione shivered... His hand was warm and faintly calloused, and was doing odd things to her breathing. She touched his cheek lightly with the backs of her fingers, deciding that it was best for him to take the lead for now. Touching him somewhere she hadn't before while he was still getting used to touching her might be a bad idea. "It's a little embarrassing," she admitted conversationally, "but my pulse is speeding up already. That feels... very nice."

"_You_ feel very nice" he growled, running his thumb along the sculpted edge of her shoulder-blade, and firmly suppressing a lunatic urge to subvert the moment by tickling her. "But it isn't me touching you that's the problem, and we have to make a start somewhere. Touch me as I'm touching you, if - if you're sure you want to. If I tell you to do it, and I know you're going to, it shouldn't make me panic. Much. And you'll never know till you try."

"Well, if I'm being invited..." She started by sliding her hand along his collarbone, stroking the fine, warm skin, slipping it inside his shirt to explore a little further. And, just to distract him a little from the potential fear, she lifted her head and kissed his ear solemnly.

He stiffened a little at that and Hermione hesitated, afraid she had scared him already; but after a moment of uncertainty he relaxed back against her and murmured "I warn you, if you're going to do things that tickle I shall retaliate in kind." He feathered his fingers lightly across her back and down her ribs as he spoke, nearly but not quite carrying out his threat.

She giggled softly, unbuttoning his shirt to press her hand flat against his chest, just over his heart. "I think a little constructive tickling might help... ease the tension a bit," she murmured, smiling at him and pressing the tip of her nose to his. "I'd rather you associated this with giggling and squirming than anything more... painful."

"I'd rather just be... peaceful, for the moment," he sighed, stroking his hand smoothly back across the small of her back and bringing it to rest on her flank, just above the hip. "And if you're going to do that you're going to make me cross-eyed. Settle down a bit, do, and don't mess about."

"I'll try. But I'm a bit nervous too, you know." She undid a couple more of his buttons, sliding her hand slowly across his ribs and up and down his back. She forced herself not to flinch at the bumps and ripples of scar-tissue... there were so many... and drew her fingers slowly up and down his spine, as if he were a cat.

Severus hissed gently and arched his back, very much like a cat. "No, it's all right," he gasped when she hesitated, unsure whether he was pleased or scared. "It's just - intense. But not bad. You don't feel - you're not threatening. You don't grab or jab or demand. And you feel - perfectly made and, and female and - almost fragile. Like a, a flower, or a fine-stemmed glass." He had his eyes shut, and seemed to be talking to himself as much as to her. After a moment he drew his hand round and up across her stomach, cupped her left breast very briefly in a way that was more sculptural appreciation than sexual pass, and finally brought his fingers to rest fanned out against her ribs just below her armpit. He opened his black eyes and looked at her, slightly dazed. "Take your shirt off - and mine - please?"

She sat up to shed her blouse, tugging it off with rather nervous haste and blushing quite hard. This was officially Further than she'd ever gone before, and as much as she liked the idea, it was still a bit nerve-wracking.

Then she turned her attention to him, taking his buttons more slowly and carefully, smoothing her hands gently over his chest and stomach as they were revealed, keeping her touch light but trying not to tickle. Then she gentled her hands over his back, as she pushed his shirt down slowly, and along his arm as she tugged the sleeve free and set the shirt carefully aside, wanting to soothe away the memories of more painful touches.

Even so, he flinched slightly and shut his eyes as he felt her hands on his arm - remembering other hands which had come bearing a knife. After a moment he forced them open again and nodded reassuringly to her to continue. And she was... lovely. His intention in asking her to do this had been tactile and sensual rather than sexual, but even so the traditional tag "small, but perfectly formed" came into his head and his breath tightened rather.

He lay back and looked at her for a moment, then laid his hand lightly in the centre of her chest and allowed his thumb to stroke her right breast, ever-so slightly. The obvious increase in her respiratory rate was very flattering to his male ego. "Lie down with me again, then," he said softly, "and just - hold me. Let me feel you." He ran the last few words past his brain again and turned slightly pink. "I don't mean - slip of the tongue!" And God, even that sounded suggestive, and the thought made him even more embarrassingly pink - doubly embarrassing because she was now grinning at him as if he'd said or done something "cute".

"I _mean_" he said firmly, gathering up the ravelled shreds of his dignity, "that I want to get used to just - lying against you skin to skin, without any pressure."

She giggled again, lying down and snuggling tentatively against him. "I know what you meant... you're absolutely adorable when you blush, though." All that skin-on-skin contact made a definite difference, and her pulse was racing, but she tried not to be obvious about it, snuggling against him and - on impulse - shaking her hair forward so it lay against his arm and shoulder. There. She defied any of the smarmy Death Eaters to produce _anything_ like the sensation of masses of soft, rather coarse curly hair. "I like this..." she whispered against his collarbone.

Snape settled rather cautiously into her embrace and slid his hand behind her shoulder, drawing her close. Her skin was fine and smooth and had the same odd cool/warm feel as silk, and her hair smelled of summer. His own hair, he knew, was still limp and lank - all Hermione's best efforts had only succeeded in lengthening the time it took it to get greasy again from two hours to twelve.

When he thought too hard about the fact that her skin was against his, not just under his hand but pressed close against his chest and stomach, he remembered other skin, coarse and sweaty, rubbing up against him, savage pain and crude laughter and a foul-tasting mouth he didn't want pressing down over his, and he started to shiver everywhere they touched - shivering with something more complex than simple fear. The worst, the most horrible thing about remembering their hands on him was that they had managed to make him aroused, nerves still firing automatically even when his mind was screaming - touch, even touch the thought of which turned his stomach, was still associated with sexual tension and sexual tension was associated with horror and with self-disgust in an unbreakable loop -

Except that this was Hermione, after all, who didn't feel anything like any of his tormentors (not even Bellatrix); Hermione who was smooth and warm and kind and so small that if they had been standing he would actually have had to bend down to rest his chin on the top of her head, as he was doing now, and who surrounded him in a blanket of warm, summery brown fuzz. Touching Hermione was all right; trembling because you were touching Hermione was all right; even trembling because when you touched Hermione you started thinking about touching her in more intimate ways and being touched back was all right; in future when he thought about being touched he could think about Hermione's kind warmth and her breath huffing against his chest, and not -

He sighed and hugged her closer, nuzzling that wonderful, ridiculous hair. "I like it too."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Hermione stroked Severus's back gently as he trembled, resting her cheek against his collarbone. "I love you," she whispered, sighing contentedly. "And I love being with you, just... holding you, like this." She was so happy right now that she felt almost floaty, and she savoured each moment of warm skin-against-skin.

For Snape's part, he could feel himself relaxing into the moment; somehow touching her was becoming ease and communion instead of tension. "It's really true, isn't it?" he said very softly. "You really do want to be - to be close to me emotionally, not just sexually. Not even primarily sexually. Why do you want to be close to me, Hermione?"

"Yes, it's really true." She drew back her head just a little, so she could meet his eyes. "I... I don't know why, exactly. It's like asking why the stars are there, or why water flows downhill. I care deeply for you. I'm also very much in love with you, and they're not entirely the same thing, although they are connected. And I don't know why I am, or what exactly it is that makes you so desperately important to me. But you are, and I want to... just _be_ with you, as much as I can." She made a face. "It's hard to put it into words... maybe if you just looked..."

She concentrated on the complicated, sometimes painful emotions he inspired in her... the grief for his suffering, the almost frightening devotion that was willing to sacrifice all pride and dignity to follow him, the strange complete feeling of being with him that had nothing to do with sex... and the way she quite liked it when he used Legilimency, loved the chance to take him in and comfort him in a way that wouldn't frighten him, to _show_ him how much she loved him without words getting in the way.

Since she had pulled back a little in order to look at him, she was no longer pressed against him so closely: but her arms were still partly around him, and the tips of her breasts brushed against his chest and made his skin tingle. And he no longer needed a wand and a spell to read her; now that he literally knew her mind, some kind of contact - eye contact, skin contact - and the will to see what she was seeing was enough. Devotion - there was always devotion there, and love, but for the life of him he couldn't understand why and just knowing that it was there didn't explain it. Frowning, he looked deeper, trying to understand the roots of her inexplicable need for him.

"You love your parents," he said dreamily, drawing her back in against him and feeling her warm smooth skin moving against his, her breath warming the hollow of his neck, "but you can't go home - you'd endanger them if you did, and in any case it was never - never a relaxing place. Always so busy and intense. You never fitted into the Muggle world very well anyway - too clever, too odd - and when you learned that you were a witch then you knew that you were irredeemably different and never would fit in. But you never entirely fitted into the wizarding world either."

She was hugging him so tightly now that he no longer needed to hold her close himself, and he relaxed his grip and let his hand stray to the back of her head, stroking her bushy hair as he would stroke a cat. "You were an exile, always, and you saw that I was equally isolated but I had - made a place to stand, on my own terms. And I became a - a fixed point to you, an idea of home, even if it was a home you didn't think you could have. Even after I was broken I was still a lodestone to you... And I was enough like you that _wanting_ me was like wanting to be the self you could be, if you only dared to be - and yet not so much like you as to make it seem incestuous" he added, with the ghost of a laugh. "Being close to me is like being whole, I think - like finding all the missing pieces of the puzzle.

"And you felt _sorry_ for me" he said wonderingly, "and I can see it and it doesn't make me burn because you never belittled me. You could see how isolated I was and that just made me more admirable to you, because you knew how it felt to be isolated and you thought I was carrying it off better than you would have done. Which is debatable, since I dealt with it by taking my temper and my loneliness out on everybody around me - but when I was horrible to you you just assumed it was your fault, and I can't tell you how much of a bloody bastard that makes me feel. And seeing me hurt was - oh, God. This was one of the reasons I never wanted to get too close to anybody - because something of the sort was always bound to happen to me, and anyone who cared about me was only heading for grief."

She burrowed her face into his chest for a moment, just holding on tightly. "Not so much an idea of home as... as an idea of a place, in the world," she said softly. "It doesn't have to be a physical place, just... a place that's _your_ place, in the scheme of things, where you fit. If that makes sense." She sighed, and sniffled a little bit. "And the grief is... worth it. To love you and be loved by you... no matter how much it hurts, sometimes, I wouldn't give it up. You... complete me. When we're apart, now, I feel as if something is missing. And I want to be able to give you the same feeling... now more than ever." With feather-light fingers, she touched his left shoulder. "Even if I haven't the power to make your body whole again, I'd like to make your heart so... or at least feel as if it is."

"My heart can never be whole" he said flatly. "Whatever happens, I'm never going to not have been that - abject thing, and I'm always going to know that all it takes to reduce me to _that_ is sufficient pain, applied for long enough. Even if you Obliviated me of everything that's happened since last June, part of me would still know that it was so - and, frankly, I wouldn't want to be Obliviated, because the whole thing has brought me - many gifts, you not the least of them. I can't be whole, but maybe with your help I can - cobble something together that still works, and sometimes a broken thing that looks cobbled together, patched, botched can be just as strong, and more interesting, than the original."

It was his turn to pull back slightly, so that he could look her in the eyes, smiling and trying, he thought, to look as handsome as he was capable of looking, although he had no great expectations in that regard. "I used to know a Muggle musician who had a 'cello that was broken, and because she was a student, and poor, instead of paying to have it mended properly, or throwing it away and buying another, she nailed a strip of plywood over the gap and kept on playing. That shouldn't have worked - it was split right up the back - but in fact it sang all the sweeter. Make me sing, Hermione." And bent to kiss her, murmuring "I'll be your place to be, if you'll be mine."

"I want nothing more," she whispered, smiling and tearing up a little. "I love you... and I want to make you happy. Broken or not, you're the only 'cello I want." She snuggled up to him... and then paused, reaching for the wand she'd tossed aside on the bed. She pointed it at the door, and muttered a good strong locking spell. "There. I'd rather not have anyone wander in here and... er... see rather more than I want anyone but you seeing."

"Oh, Lord, yes. I'm not sure whether Albus would shout at us or twinkle - but either one would be mortifying."

Hermione blushed, the wave of red descending to below her collarbone. "Oh, just the thought of Professor Dumbledore catching me half-naked..." She hid her face against his neck. "I'm getting embarrassed just thinking about it!"

"And that's not even to mention the risk of the sight of so much... femininity giving the old man a coronary" Snape murmured contentedly, settling down comfortably against her bare warmth, and feeling a pleasurable increase in his own pulse-rate.

Hermione blushed even harder. "You shush," she muttered, kissing his collarbone. "Before I combust from sheer embarrassment."

"And that would never do. When I am... when we've - got the hang of being bare together, and showers and so on, and you agree that I smell suitably like a rose, then I mean to make you catch fire from something much more interesting than embarrassment. If, that is, that sounds agreeable to you."

"Very agreeable, yes. I like this too, though. Just snuggling up and _being_ together. When you're comfortable with it, it'd be nice to sleep this way... maybe not exactly easy to sleep, given, uhm, our mutual involuntary physical reactions, but... nice."

"It is... nice" he said, rubbing his cheek against her hair. "It - heightens the feeling of closeness and companionship, quite apart from the sexual aspect. It makes me feel - oh, God, cared for, accepted, acceptable... But there _is_ a sexual aspect, as you yourself acknowledge, and as such... I fear it will be a long time before I can actually sleep a night like this. If I were to dream myself - back there, naked and unable to keep them from - touching me, and then wake to find myself naked and being touched..."

"I know... but maybe someday we'll be able to. It's something to look forward to." She traced her fingers across his back, spelling out his name and then hers. "And we could always take it in intermediate steps... you know, start with me just not wearing much, then maybe me undressed but you not... it might be easier if you weren't the one who was naked, although I know even that will take time."

"Mmm - well, the idea of you naked is certainly an attractive one, and you don't feel - well, threatening. A nice, pocket-sized model, with everything in due proportion. In fact I wonder that you don't seem to find _me_ threatening, when I am so much taller. I mean - I was. And I might be all right, if not now then soon, about sleeping in a nightshirt or light robes that were open - I mean, I wouldn't feel so, um, exposed if I woke to find you touching my chest and I could feel that I still had clothes on my back, my arm - it wouldn't feel so much like..."

"Good. We'll do that, then, when you're ready for it." She nuzzled his neck contentedly. "And no, you don't feel threatening at all. It's quite nice, actually, being small and tuck-in-able under your chin. It feels very warm and safe."

"People usually do find me threatening, even when I'm busting my bloody - back to protect them. The idea that you don't, that's... liberating, if that makes any sense to you."

"It does, in a way. And I did find you a bit intimidating before. But now... you're still quite capable of being threatening, even now, but it's...nice to know that you can. Because I know you're not going to do it _at_ me, and I quite like the thought of having someone around to be intimidating on my behalf. Ron and Harry try, but they're no good at it, and... well. I like the thought of snuggling up under your arm and being... protected. Just like I'd protect you, if I was needed."

"So I'm to be an attack-dog, am I?" he asked, deeply amused. Abstractedly, part of his brain registered that he was hardly even noticing the skin-thing anymore, which must be a Good Sign, surely? "What kind of dog shall I be? A skinny, spiky Doberman, do you suppose? Or just a mongrel. And what will you be, when you're protecting me? One of those hairy little terriers, all spirit and sharp teeth?"

"Oh, you're lucky I like you... I don't let most people make jokes about my hair! But no, you're more like a tiger than a dog, all teeth and claws and menacing purr and stripes of light and darkness. And I may be a rather ordinary tabby, but that doesn't mean I couldn't savage someone for you if you needed me to."

"Oh, you would never be an ordinary tabby - any more than Minerva is." He shifted position so that he could smile at her teasingly. "You'd be like the cat in the poem.

"She moved through the garden in glory because  
She had very long claws at the end of her paws.  
Her back was arched, her tail was high.  
A green fire glared in her vivid eye;  
And all the toms, though never so bold,  
Quailed at the martial Marigold.

"But you wouldn't rather have me... unstriped? It doesn't disturb you that I have... stains of darkness that will never be clean?"

"It makes me sad for you," she said softly, touching his cheek. "I know it hurts you. But... no, I wouldn't have you unstriped. You wouldn't be _you_, then, and all I want is you, just as you are." She kissed him firmly, by way of emphasis. "Stripes and all."

"Even though I've had to do... terrible things, at times? Even though, when I was young and more stupid than Potter will ever be, I did some terrible things I didn't have to do?"

"Even so," she said quietly. "I love you. You, as you are, stripes and wounds and all. I wish you were happier, that you understood _why_ you mean so much to me... but I, for myself, wouldn't change you. You've been through so much, to get to this point, how could I want to take any of it away from you?"

Snape shut his eyes, his mouth pulled into a grim line. "It isn't for my own sake that I want to change the things I did - it's for the sake of the people I did them to. But - oh, God. Sometimes I think I deserved what happened to me - last year; that I deserved to be punished. Sometimes I think I can't live with the memories, that I would give anything not to spend my nights reliving torture and - assault - and not to have found out what I truly was. Then I think that that is intellectually dishonest, that if I _am_ that - crawling thing it's as well to know it, and a lie to pretend otherwise."

He opened his eyes again and smiled at her rather painfully. "And then I remember that if I could change what happened, if I could go back and somehow avoid that - horrible - then I'd be whole, insofar as I ever was, but I'd lose all this along with it. I wouldn't have found out that you and Minerva and even Albus apparently love me, strange though that seems to me; I wouldn't have found out that you desire me, which seems even stranger - not that I'm complaining! Hell, I wouldn't even have found out that Longbottom has a brain."

"You did _not_ deserve what happened to you!" she said sharply. "Whatever you've done, you'd paid for it long before you were discovered. Years and years of knowing it was coming, of walking a knife's edge of fear and suspicion, of being alone..." Her eyes filled at the thought of how miserable he'd been, for so long. "You worked so hard to make up for your mistakes, you did more than most people would ever dream of doing to atone for them, and you did NOT deserve what happened to you! And you're not a _thing_, no matter what they told you or made you believe!

"And yes, Neville has a brain, and Professor Dumbledore loves you and Professor McGonagall loves you and _I_ love you and believe me, you would have found out that last one eventually because I'm rotten at keeping secrets and it probably would have got a bit obvious when I'd left school and had to start finding new ways to see you. And if I could I'd risk meddling with time to rescue you the minute they caught you, so you didn't have to go through all this, because I would love you _anyway_ and I'm s-selfish enough to want to believe that that would be enough."

"It would have been, I think. It would have taken longer, if I had not been - broken like a smashed vase and then put back together differently - and if I had been well enough still to be teaching I couldn't possibly have taken you up on it uh, physically until you finished school. Certainly not unless you agreed to drop Potions, so that I was at least no longer _your_ teacher. But just knowing that somebody found me attractive, and cared about me enough to save me..." He sighed and shook his head, stroking his thumb gently across Hermione's bare shoulder. "It's an appealing idea - but the trouble with meddling with time is that you can never be sure you won't end up with something even worse. Suppose you had been killed saving me? God knows, I'd rather suffer _this_ than have any serious harm come to you, and I would have been eaten alive with fresh guilt which would have soured my disposition even worse than it was already.

"And..." He looked down, unable to meet her eyes. "_I_ see myself as having been reduced to just a, a thing, at the time if not now. Everything that I value about myself, everything that makes me me, my intellect, my pride, my willingness to take risks for what I believe and to take the consequences - even my capacity to hate, all of it was stripped away from me. I was so far gone, I was fucking _grateful_ to them if they ordered me to do something which didn't actually hurt. However... humiliating. You - you saw me when I was... brought in. Crying, cringing, with less self-control than an infant, without a thought in my bloody head except whether I was going to be hurt again - how can you say that I was still a, a person?" He became aware, abruptly, that looking down meant that he had a distractingly clear view of Hermione's cleavage, and forced himself to look up again, colouring slightly.

"I did see you when you were brought in," she said quietly. "And nobody... _nobody_, you stubborn man... could have expected you to be coherent or even remotely sane after you'd suffered so horribly. The human mind can only take so much, even one as disciplined as yours. Not to mention the prolonged sleep-deprivation, the starvation, all the potions and hexes... sleep deprivation alone can completely unravel a person's mind, let alone all of it put together. Not being Superman, invulnerable and indestructible, doesn't make you a thing. It makes you a person, with all the same weaknesses that the rest of us have.

"Anybody would have been in the same state, and most people would have got to it a lot faster than you did. It doesn't make you weak, and it certainly doesn't make you less than a person. You went through more than most people could survive with even a shred of themselves intact." She held him tightly. "But you came back to us... despite everything you'd suffered, you managed to make yourself come back, instead of just... surrendering, when the spells finally came off and you could. And it would have broken our hearts to lose you, but nobody would have blamed you, not a bit... but you didn't, you held on and you started trying to put yourself back together. Not one person in a thousand could have been so brave."

Snape hugged her back, finding the skin-to-skin contact comforting now instead of frightening - a proof that he was connected to someone, and not cast adrift in his own nightmares. "Keep telling me so," he sighed against her hair; "keep telling me so and I might one day believe it."

"I'll tell you so every single time you even think anything so silly," she murmured, rubbing the tip of her nose gently along his collarbone. "Deserving it indeed. Brave, adorable, silly man." She loved being able to say things like that, knowing he wouldn't laugh...

"Dear practical, sensible Hermione, you do make it all seem much more - manageable, somehow." And then he did laugh - a genuine laugh, if slightly cracked.

"I _couldn't_ just give up and die, could I? Minerva ordered me to stay - and I can't possibly disobey her when she does her Deputy Headmistress voice. She's so much more intimidating than Albus. And there were so many... nice things, intriguing things, colours, smells - I'm told that was mainly your idea, and it was a good one. It reminded me that the world wasn't just - pain and misery and the cold dark. Not to mention Adrian: that - weird accent of his is so hypnotic I had to stay to hear more of it, and I couldn't disappoint him by dying after he was so pleased with himself for saving me. In fact he tells me he 'whispered' me - whatever that means."

"I can see that," she said, nodding. "I know I certainly wouldn't have dared die after she ordered me not to. As for the nice things... Adrian started it, bringing wine for you to drink. You couldn't handle more than a sip or two, but you liked it. So then I tried to think of other things that would be as NOT like that place as possible. Like washing and brushing your hair for you, and giving you the softest blankets we could find... the shell and stained-glass mobile we put over your bed was Neville's idea. He thought bright colours and chimes would help."

"It did help. There were no - colours there. Except blood. And it... I've always been quite - ascetic. Where I come from, anything else would probably be seen as - well, soft. But after... after months where there was nothing good at all, nothing pleasant, nothing that wasn't - _dirty_ or horrible, just to have some things that were nice, to have people actively wanting to do nice things for me, to have - pleasure instead of misery, even in small ways..." He bent his head and kissed the point of her shoulder. "I think I've developed a taste for it, rather."

"Oh, good. Does that mean I get to keep fussing over you and indulging you? Because I really like doing that." She shivered happily at the kiss. "I intend to make your life as pleasant and as _nice_ as possible, from now on. An ambition I share with quite a few people, I might add, but I'm not sharing the semi-naked cuddling part. Only _I_ get to improve your day in this particular way."

Snape shuddered delicately. "The idea of getting semi-naked with any of the rest of them is either appalling or terrifying." He thought about it for a moment. "Lovegood would definitely be in the 'terrifying' category. And... I'm so used to people deliberately making my life more difficult that I just accepted it as natural. The idea that there are people who care about how my life is and actively want to make it better is... as if a weight had been lifted off me that I didn't even know I was carrying. It might be - nice to go on being fussed over, within reason, so long as you let me fuss over you too: I've never really had anybody whom I could indulge, before."

"My goodness..." She blinked, and smiled suddenly. "I would like that very much. I'm... usually the one doing the fussing, not the one getting fussed over. It would be very nice to be fussed and indulged a bit, sometimes, especially by you. It'd be wonderful, actually." She gave him a rather lingering kiss. "We could take turns... or just commence a mutual fussing campaign and see who is reduced to soppy pet names first. I definitely think I could enjoy a campaign of mutually assured contentment..."

Being kissed in such an obviously sexual way while his skin was bare made his pulse hammer and race, but he found when he could breathe again that there was more pleasure in it than fear, and he felt suddenly extremely motivated to overcome his own terrors and progress to more intimate activity as fast as possible. "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" he murmured, returning the kiss with interest, until he felt Hermione shivering in the curve of his arm. "Seriously. You're always telling me that I deserve some kindness and care for all the - sacrifices I've made, but then so do you. You are always the one pulling the Idiot Boys out of trouble and worrying about injustice and the sufferings of downtrodden house-elves - it's high time somebody took care of you, for a change. On a basis of mutual understanding and full equality, of course. It would be nice to have that kind of - reciprocal partnership. To care for and be cared for..."

"It really would," she agreed, cuddling against him. "I'd... I feel a little guilty for it, but I'd really like to have you take care of me. It was always part of your appeal, actually... the fact that you were stronger and older and a lot bigger than me and I wouldn't have to mother you. Because I quite like doing that for Harry and Neville, who haven't got mothers of their own and who are really very sweet about it... but I'd like to not _always_ be the one doing the looking after. I'd loathe always being the one who's looked after even worse, though, it's so bloody condescending, being treated like I'm made of porcelain. But... caring and being cared for, looking after each other... that would be wonderful."

"I must confess," he said thoughtfully, "that I'd quite like to be mothered - since my own mother never did anything of the kind. But not all the time, certainly - that would make me feel all hot and small - and besides, Minerva and Molly and Poppy have all already volunteered for that job. No, what I need is somebody who is on my level - neither parent nor child - and who I can feel is _on my side_, as I am on theirs." Lily, as much as he had loved her and as much as she had been his friend, had been too critical and contrary to offer much in the way of support, and Avery and Mulciber had had a talent for sloping off whenever he needed actual backing against actual hexes - even before they had metamorphosed into jeering torturers. He pulled a face. "The thing I always envied the bloody Marauders for, in fact, although in the event their little Gang of Four was more show than substance, and riddled with treachery. But you and I really could be a, a team. I'm even prepared to tolerate Potter and Weasley, provided they don't monopolize your time _too_ much. Especially as it seems they actually rather like me, when they don't know it's me - that really is the best joke."

"I will always be on your side," she promised. "If you'll be on mine. We can look out for each other, and... and guard each other's backs. I'd like that... and actually, they've been complaining a lot about how much you monopolize my time. They're not used to having competition for my attention." She grinned. "And they think you're _wonderful_, if they don't know it's you." She paused. "Although... is there anything really dangerous in there?" she asked worriedly. "Harry's tested a couple of them on Ron, and I don't want him to get really hurt..."

"Hum. Well, you have to be a bit careful with Levicorpus - the hanging-upside-down-by-the-foot one - because obviously it wouldn't be safe to drop the - ah, subject from too high up, or onto anything hard. And the Two-Foot Toenails hex can cause some damage if the person is wearing really thick shoes. But the only really dangerous one is one called Sectumsempra. It..."

He paused for a moment, pressing his cheek against her hair and trying not to think about how scared and miserable he had been when he invented that curse. "You must understand, Hermione, that I was - that I felt myself to be - isolated, and very much outnumbered. Sectumsempra is a slicing hex, but more controlled than most: equivalent, if you like, to wielding a flick-knife. It will cut - anything organic, really, wherever you point your wand. If you really wanted to, you could prune roses with it. But it was designed to - well, to cut people, and if you actually cut something off them it won't normally regrow.

"I know that sounds bad - but it was one of the few spells that would work on a werewolf and not just heal instantly and, well, you'll understand why I thought I might need it. And so long as you're careful with it it doesn't cut very deep, and used properly it was intended to be defensive rather than offensive, to just - give somebody a little nick, to scare them off with, really. Potter might even find it useful to defend himself with, the next time he runs his silly neck into some Death Eater's noose. But if he used it clumsily - especially if he doesn't yet know much healing-magic - there's a risk he could take someone's arm off or hit an artery or an eye or something and do somebody real damage."

"A real duelling-curse," Hermione murmured, hugging him reassuringly. "The closest you could get to combining Muggle and Wizard duelling, I should think. And... like I said, under the circumstances, I understand that you needed to protect yourself. I'll warn Harry again about testing things on Ron, though, and you can warn him about that one when you tell him." She curled closer. "And from now on, you won't feel isolated or outnumbered, not if I can help it."

"Thank you. Although whether I will still feel outnumbered, even with you at my side, will depend on the scale of the opposition... However. You know Potter - I don't think that a generic warning that the Prince's spells could be dangerous is going to stop him, especially as most of them aren't. And it would be just like the little sod to do something drastic before I get a chance to speak to him. Find a chance to flick through the dratted book and _find_ Sectumsempra - it's in the left-hand margin somewhere near the middle of the book, as I recall - and then tell him you worked out what the Latin means."

"Always cutting?"

He coughed and coloured slightly. "Technically, yes. But, um, one of the meanings of Severus is "cut off" - probably in the sense of "isolated," but I chose to interpret it as "cutter." So, um, Sectumsempra was my way of saying "Sever forever." It was a bit... adolescent of me, I know. But of a piece with calling myself the bloody Half-Blood Prince in the first place."

She gave him a rather awed look. "You can create new spells and make puns in Latin. That's... wow. Almost as inflaming as snuggling up half-naked, honestly. Anyway, I'll find it and warn them - of course, I may first have to explain the idea that Latin words mean things."

"If you can teach them that any long word has meaning it will be a start. How will they ever learn to make their own spells, if they don't understand at least pidgin-Latin?"

"Oh, god, NEVER suggest that to them!" Hermione said, giving him a horrified look. "Create their own spells? Them? They'd burn the castle to the ground, stone or not! If they want new spells, you or I can make them!"

"I take your point, but they must know it's possible - the Gred and Forge Conglomerate do it all the time, and they know that I - in my guise as the Prince! - invented my own hexes. It's only idleness which has prevented them from burning the castle about our ears already, and if either of them is doing a Charms N.E.W.T. - are they? I don't recall. Anyway, if they are, Filius teaches elementary spell-design as part of his standard Seventh Year course."

"Knowing it's possible and thinking of doing it themselves are two entirely different things. They know it's possible to get an 'O' in Potions but you don't see them doing it, do you? And yes, they are doing Charms. Drat it. I'll keep a very, very close eye on them... and no, I won't do their work for them, I'll just be ready to put out the fires." She sighed, and snuggled up to him. "Do you think you and I could do some spell-inventing together? Sometime when we have time? It would be fun."

"It would, indeed, be very interesting - but then you would _have_ to get away from just doing things by the book, and be prepared to be original and, sometimes, to fail."

"I know. And it's a scary thought." She smiled at him. "But I trust you not to laugh at me... at least, not just for making a mistake."

"That would somewhat depend on how risible and egregious the mistake was. If it was _very_ risible I would either be gravely sympathetic or tease you unmercifully, depending on my mood at the time."

"I don't care how well my accident elicits laughter," she said firmly, giving him a kiss for actually using "risible" in a sentence. "If you laugh, I'll do my best to visit similar consequences on you." She grinned suddenly. "I've always had a secret dread of causing some terrible accident to happen to my hair... turning it purple, or making it bigger, or something. Even my nearest and dearest wouldn't be able to help laughing."

"Now purple might quite suit you, depending on the shade of course. A bright purple or a mauve would look hideous, but a nice aubergine or an amethyst would be... intriguing, especially if it went purple, um, _everywhere_. You could start a fashion. And you've got me wondering now whether we could come up with a Medusa charm, to make the locks of your hair writhe around like snakes - that really would impress the little first years! Of course, you might need a cat-comb to separate them afterwards..."

"Definitely not purple... although a nice deep green might suit me." She tickled his chin with the tip of a curl. "And it's a sign of your terrible influence on me, I think, that after picturing the terror of the little firsties, I then went on to immediately think of the potential uses for self-writhing hair. I could let my hands AND my hair wander..."

Snape flinched, slightly but definitely, in suddenly renewed awareness of his position here, half-naked as he was. "I am not ready, quite yet, to think about - hands, wandering much. Not when I'm still getting used to - well, being touched on my skin like this without it hurting. Although I suppose being felt up by a manic self-propelled bottle-green teasel would be unique enough not to bring back any - unfortunate associations. I'm not sure about green, though - if you got the shade wrong, it might make you look as if you were growing mould. Or moss. Although actually moss-green might be quite nice."

"A teasel?" Hermione protested. "A manic teasel? It's not THAT bad! See if I let you play with it any more." She pouted, and then kissed the tip of his nose very gently. "And I'm sorry about the wandering hands bit... I'm getting a bit, uhm, distracted with all the half-naked snuggling, and I forgot you probably weren't ready for that yet. The hair might actually be better, though, your horrible comments about it aside. A bit tickly, maybe, but certainly different."

"Half of me _is_ ready," he said earnestly; "very, very ready. But the other half still wants to curl up into a ball and shake and I don't want to risk provoking it into actually doing so, yus kin. It's not - well, not really the image a man wishes to project when he is... courting" he murmured, ducking his head and kissing her along the line of her shoulder. "Even if there is something... oddly comforting and reassuring about reliving all that - terror and shame and self-loathing while _knowing_ that you'll hold me and tell me not to be so foolish. And I can't make up my mind whether that's bad of me - enjoying offloading my own idiotic traumas onto somebody so much younger than me, when it should be my place to comfort you - or whether I should be pleased to provide you with another opportunity to show off your skills!

"And I like your hair" he added, burying his face in it and breathing in the coconut scent of the shampoo she used. "It's so... uninhibited, even when the rest of you is being starchy - as if part of you is always escaping from your own control and running wild. It gives me hope that you may prove to be equally... uninhibited in other ways. When, that is, I've recovered enough to be less bloody inhibited myself, of course."

Hermione blushed, but snuggled up to him in a pleased way. "I rather think I will be, once the nerves wear off and I stop feeling as if I've, I've managed to stumble into an exam on the most important subject in the world starkers and woefully underprepared. I'm glad I'm getting to do it, even by the inches I know you need, but I'm even more nervous than usual about making a poor showing.

"As for the curling into a ball and shaking, and you liking having me here... I'm glad you do. _I_ like having me here, too. The thought of you reliving the pain and fear and everything without me here to comfort you is much worse." She stroked his back gently, drawing idle patterns with her fingertips. "Besides, your traumas aren't idiotic, they're extremely sensible and solidly founded. Which makes facing them and coming to terms with them even more difficult, and you're not to blame yourself for needing time to face them. And you'll get your chance to comfort me, I promise you - I generally try not to do it in front of people, but I cry like a waterworks with embarrassing regularity. Especially when I fight with Harry and Ron, and I'd probably produce absolute rivers of tears if I had a real fight with you."

"Then I shall endeavour to curb my natural inclination to pick fights with all and sundry, at least where you're concerned. Even though it would please me to comfort you," he murmured, rubbing his face against her hair, "I would hate to be the cause of your needing to be comforted. And I'm glad you think I'm not just - being fucking _stupid_ and feeble and - useless when I start to panic. And, well..." He squashed his own nerves back down with a ruthless hand and, greatly daring, nibbled delicately at Hermione's ear. "This is one exam where turning up starkers will earn you extra points, believe me."

"I don't mind arguing... but no fighting, please," she agreed, shivering as he nibbled on her ear. "Mmm... I like that, though..." She drew her fingertips around the edge of his ear, since she couldn't reach to nibble it in response. "And I don't think you're stupid, or feeble, or useless... I feel as if I am, sometimes, when I want to comfort you and I don't know how, but never you. You... awe me, sometimes, with how strong you are. I couldn't be a tenth as brave."

"I don't know if it's bravery, in my case, or just force of habit" he replied honestly. "Thanks to my bloody father, and Harry's bloody father - and godfather - and bloody, bloody Lucius, I spent most of my formative years absolutely bloody terrified, being slapped around and humiliated. In the end, you get so used to being terrified that - well, you don't exactly stop being scared, but you get so bloody _used_ to it that it doesn't bother you any more."

He rolled over onto his back, reducing the physical contact between them - but this way, he could look at her, and he did so, stroking her hair back behind her ear and gazing at her seriously. "And you are being brave, Hermione; very brave indeed. It takes more courage than I have to express love to someone you are almost sure will reject you - and a very great deal of courage to become... involved with someone as damaged as I am. To take on the burden of caring for someone who may always be - fractured, in mind as well as in body."

She went pink, looking rather pleased. "It did take a lot of courage to tell you how I felt," she admitted. "But getting involved with you didn't. Broken or not, you are you, and thus all I want." She rested her hand flat on his chest, just over his heart. "And you're not a burden. You're going to be one hell of a challenge, I know that - it's in your nature - but I can't imagine you ever being a burden. And I'm going to try to get you out of the habit of being afraid, if I can. Do you think it would be too dreadful to have to get used to being adored, instead?"

"It's a terrifying thought" he replied, half serious and half teasing. "Being adored - it's such a responsibility. Suddenly my miserable scrap of a life isn't just my own, to use up and throw away as I please - someone else's happiness depends on my survival; on my recovery, insofar as that is even possible. And the idea of being openly admired is so unnerving it makes me want to pull my head into my shoulders like a tortoise and hide. But I could learn to live with it, I think!"

"I hope so," she said seriously, smoothing his hair back from his thin face. "And you're just going to have to get used to the idea of being admired. It's going to go on happening, I'm afraid, if you will persist in going around being a hero. Don't be too heroic, though... I would be broken-hearted if I lost you now, you're quite right about that."

Snape turned his face to the side, rubbing his cheek against her hand like a great cat, and then looked back at her, his face unreadably neutral. "Then I will promise you, here and now," he said softly, "not to kill myself, unless I am in enemy hands with no prospect of rescue or escape - and hope I do not live to regret it. I know that at the moment - at the moment my mood changes from hour to hour, sometimes... lively and full of hope, especially when I'm with you! - sometimes a, a quagmire of self-disgust which I can't help thinking is justified, even when I'm feeling brighter. But you must realize, as I do, that in the future there are likely to be - long periods, months, when I sink into black depression. Just as there will probably be long periods when I feel quite - adjusted, and no longer want to claw my own skin off in revulsion, even a little bit."

Hermione opened her mouth to protest, and he pressed his fingers to her lips. "Shhh. I'm giving you my solemn promise, I won't top myself just because I - feel that I am something too disgusting to be allowed to live, or that you and the whole world would be better off without me - and so you will always have your chance to chivvy me out of it, and in fact I have fairly firm confidence that you'll always succeed. Eventually."

Her eyes had filled with tears when he made his promise, and she leaned over to kiss him lightly. "And I'll feel guilty for holding you to that promise," she whispered, "for wanting you to go on despite everything you've already had to suffer... but I will hold you to it all the same. I love you so much it hurts, and I will keep loving you even when you're at your bitter and unhappy worst. I don't ever want you to leave me." She sniffled, wiping her eyes hastily with her hand. "And I'm sorry, I did promise I'd try not to be terribly sentimental."

"Just so long as you continue to resist the urge to call me by any twee pet-names... As for military heroism..." He sighed and pulled a face. "I've shot my bolt as a spy, haven't I? - and although I feel guilty about not feeling guilty about no longer being able to fulfil my function etc. etc. I can't honestly say I'm sorry. I could still fight, in theory and if I get the hang of Filius's prostheses well enough to allow me to move freely - but I might be more of a liability in battle than a help. I don't know how I'm going to be if I run into Lucius or - or any of the others who... _used_ me, I don't know if I'll react with murderous fury - which could have its uses, yus kin, and I like to think I'd make quite a good berserker - or whether I'd... well. Collapsing in a quivering heap and sobbing for mercy in the middle of a fight might create a useful distraction, but I don't really fancy it. It's not how I want to appear in the history books!"

"I don't think any of us would let you go into battle, even if you had the best prostheses in the world. They're far too intent on killing you... or hurting you... and they're going to have to go through every one of us to do it now. You've done more for us than anyone could ever have asked or expected, and now you get to stop doing it and rest while we carry on with what you started. To lose you now would cost us more in morale and... and _hope_ than could possibly be gained by you taking the risk."

"You're going to hate me for saying this, but it almost sounds as if I ought to _let_ myself be captured, in order to inspire a daring raid on the - on Riddle's stronghold. Don't worry," he added hastily, seeing the distress in her face; "even I'm not that bloody masochistic, and I wouldn't do that to you - or to the others, for that matter. As strange as it still seems to me, that anyone would care."

He brushed a lingering tear off her cheek with his thumb, feeling rather sentimental himself although he was far too northern to admit to it. "Oddly enough, even after..." - he gestured eloquently at the emptiness where his left arm should be - "and despite - despite spending a lot of my time wanting to claw my own skin off, I probably feel less bitter at present than I have ever done. Because it wasn't - it wasn't the bad things that had happened to me which made me bitter, as bad as many of them were; it was the fact that so little that was good had ever happened to me. It was - the grinding certainty that nobody really cared whether I lived or died, except for the ones like Black who had an active preference for my death; the, the feeling that I was despised, unwelcome, whatever sacrifices I might make for the cause.

"But now..." He pressed his thumb gently into the corner of her mouth, causing her to smile. "Now I know that there are people who do care whether I live or die - and who want me to live! Now I am beginning to build up a, a store of good things, good memories, to keep in a kist and take out and look at when I feel cold - your loving me, Minerva singing to me in the night, Adrian bringing me wine when I had hardly a thought in my head, to let me know he saw me as a real person even so, and not just an item of work - and I wonder, why should I be bitter? I have some - some sweetness now, to sweeten _me_, and I should be glad of that. Am glad of it."

"I do care, and I do very much want you to live," Hermione murmured, turning her head to kiss his thumb gently. "And I'll make you as many good memories as I can... everything from snuggling up together half-naked just being close, to baking for you. I can bake, you know. I make quite good macaroons." She smiled, still a little teary, and touched his face lovingly. "And any time the good memories aren't enough, you only have to call me to have me right by your side for as long as you want me... and classes be damned. You're more important. And I have never said that to anyone before."

"Good Lord - I'm flattered, truly. But new-found affection or no new-found affection, if I make you fail your NEWTs Minerva will skelp me!"

She laughed, and kissed the tip of his nose. "Oh, I could sit my NEWTs right now and pass, really. All that obsessive studying, you know... but don't worry, I won't let you hurt my schoolwork too much. If you ever did really need me, though, during the day, I'm far enough ahead in all my classes to miss one or two without any trouble, so you mustn't hesitate to call me if you want me."

"Dear God, you really must love me, if you'd settle for a mere pass for my sake!" He hooked his arm behind her shoulders and pulled her down against him, skin on skin, then rolled over with her to kiss her properly, slowly and deeply. "I could get a taste for this," he murmured into her open mouth. "I really could." The part of his nature that was still hot and alive suddenly wanted to go much further, much faster, but commonsense told him that if he tried it, freezing panic would overtake him in short order - and a large part of him still expected Hermione to change her mind, and he had no desire to rush her into anything she might not be entirely sure about.

She laughed, returning the kiss lingeringly. "I do indeed love you more than the prospect of getting all O's on my NEWTs," she agreed, smiling up at him. "And I could definitely get a taste for this myself. We should definitely try this bare-skin experiment again as often as possible."

"Most definitely. And - once I get - used to it we could progress to... showers. And things. Definitely things."

* * *

**Author's note:**

"Bail" means among other things an enclosed courtyard or a barrier which divides a stable into individual stalls, so to bail someone up is to back them into an enclosed space.

Old Man's Beard is a common British hedgerow plant, _Clematis vitalba_, which has little white flowers which smell like vanilla, and white, fluffy seed pods.

Francis Bacon was a rather louche, alcoholic, promiscuously gay British artist who tended to paint wild, distorted scenes of red-faced people screaming - his Screaming Popes series is especially well-known. At his death, there were a lot of people pontificating (as it were) about the deep inner meaning of his contorted style, but two comments by friends of his especially stood out.

One said that Bacon did all his painting while suffering from a hangover, which I thought explained a lot. The other said "You think his style is distorted and surreal? You should have seen the people he hung around with - they _really looked like that_."

The calming tea which Neville brewed really exists and really works. It's known as Dee's Tea and was invented by my friend Dee Suil-Levanne who is among many other things a qualified herbalist. It consists of twelve parts Rosebay Willowherb leaf (known in the U.S.A. as Fireweed) to four parts St John's Wort leaf, one part Valerian root and one part Chamomile flowers. It's very soothing and has no known harmful side-effects, other than slight drowsiness if you drink a lot of it. But you do have to make sure you get Rosebay Willowherb (_Chamerion angustifolium_) and not Great Hairy Willowherb (_Epilobium hirsutum),_ which is slightly poisonous.

To "hoick" something up or out is to tug on it in a rough, abrupt way.

To feel your breath tighten (which I am told is an expression Americans don't use) is to feel your ribs constrict so that breathing becomes rather forced."She moved through the garden in glory because..." - poem by Richard Garnett.

The real "Gang of Four" were four close associates of Chairman Mao, who were arrested after his death and accused of having been among the principal architects of China's disastrous Cultural Revolution.

"Yus kin" is a north Derbyshire expression, from the sort of area Snape probably comes from. Literally, it means "You are kin to me:" metaphorically it means "You understand what I'm saying." Referring to your parents as "my Mums and Dads" is also a Derbyshire thing.

A kist is an old-fashioned word for a chest - in the sense of a big box, not a bust.

We've had complaints that Snape shouldn't be as self-aware as he is here, and also that he and Hermione are being too "fluffy". To begin with, Snape has spent years fooling one of the best Legilimens on record (either Voldie or Albus, depending on which side you think he's on). He wouldn't be able to do that if he simply closed his mind to them, because neither of them would trust him if they couldn't read him. Whichever of them he is fooling, he must be able to open his mind up and let them see a totally convincing, natural-looking set of thoughts and feelings and memories which have in fact been subtly and invisibly edited: and I don't believe he could keep that up for ten minutes unless he is exceptionally well-aware of the contents of his own head.

As for them being "too fluffy", how do readers think a plain, socially awkward, lonely, traumatized and sex-starved middle-aged man would react to finding out that a personable eighteen-year-old girl fancied him madly? How do they think a love-struck eighteen-year-old would react to finding out that the object of her affections fancied her back? No doubt if they stayed together for a long time there would be things about each other which they would start to find annoying and which they would have to work around, because frankly everybody on earth is annoying in large doses; but at the moment they have only been dating, or whatever you want to call it, for less than two weeks and are still in that first flush of infatuation where all the love-object's little mannerisms look endearing rather than irritating. It would be totally unrealistic to have them snapping and snarling at each other just because some readers have a "thing" for snarly!Snape - or because some people think that the idea that a couple might actually like each other and get on well together is in itself unbelievable.

With regard to the person who said that Sirius did endanger Harry, by trying to get him to sneak out to visit him in hiding, it's very easy to make that mistake; Dyce and I both did so ourselves, until we re-read it. Sirius was being such a prat that it's easy to miss it, but he didn't ask Harry to sneak out: he asked Harry to meet him in Hogsmeade during the next Hogsmeade weekend. He sulked because Harry was trying to protect _him_ from danger, and was refusing to condone him, Sirius, taking stupid risks with his own safety; but the only danger he was putting Harry into was that of getting into trouble for consorting with an escaped convict, if Sirius was caught.

Note that Dyce's solo post-HBP HGSS story _Accountable_ is currently in progress on fanfiction . net, and being updated twice a week. It's a lot less dark than _Lost and Found_ but full of interesting incidents and lively, believable characterization. Get on board, if you aren't already.

A new chapter of whitehound's solo story _Sons of Prophecy_ is also imminent, and should be appearing either on Christmas Eve or Boxing Day.

This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_, to show Flitwick trying to retrieve the Hufflepuff cup from Gringott's rather than from a mine-shaft, as we originally had it, and to comment on Snape's sense of guilt and on the fact that he did have friendships at school, but they weren't very supportive. The comments about Sectumsempra have also been adjusted.

The conversation between Snape and Hooch about his progress with the prostheses has been re-edited to add comments about Sylvanus Kettleburn, Hagrid's predecessor as Care of Magical Creatures master. It was mentioned _en passant_ in _The Tales of Beedle the Bard_ that Professor Kettleburn had had only one and a half natural limbs left during the whole of the time that he worked for Dumbledore, so it seemed natural that Snape, being similarly maimed, would think about his former colleague.

I (whitehound) originally assumed that because Sectumsempra can be translated as "Sever Forever", and because Snape referred at the end of HBP to Harry stealing his spells, plural, Snape himself must have invented Sectumsempra, despite the fact that it was written in his book without any workings-out. But the revelation in DH that the name describes its action, and the casual way Remus refers to it as if it is a well-known spell, makes it more ambiguous. In my solo stories I have decided to have Snape not having invented the spell, but having simply adopted it because of the name. In this story, though, I left it as his own invention, since we had already written the conversation between him and Hermione about it.

Why would young Severus want to invent, or even learn, such a nasty spell? Well, the fact that Sectumsempra prevents missing bits from being regrown isn't as bad as it sounds, because we've plenty of evidence that the wizarding world can't usually replace missing bits _anyway_.

Then, we know werewolves are immune to most magic, because Snape had to be rescued from Remus. Were-Remus turns into a beast with paws who cannot hold a wand, so if magic worked on him Snape could simply have Stupefied him, and wouldn't have needed James to save him. We can also surmise that werewolves probably heal almost instantly - partly because tradition says that only silver can kill them, and partly because we know that in were-form Remus bites and scratches himself, and outside the realms of fanon there's no mention of him being scarred. So young Snape might well have felt that he needed such a spell which interfered with magical healing for protection from Remus - and we now know that the first time we see him use it, during the underpants incident, was _after_ Sirius tried to feed him to the werewolf.

If he invented that spell, or was taught it or a predecessor by his mother, when he was much younger, he might have had another reason. Growing up, as he probably did, somewhere in the Manchester area he would have started school while the notorious paedophile serial killers called the Moors Murderers were operating in that area. He or his mother might well have thought that a defensive spell which produced wounds which looked as if they'd been made by a Muggle weapon could be a literal life-saver.


	18. 16 Voice Recognition

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

Our apologies for the length of time it's taken to do this particular chapter. Much of the story was already written before we began posting it; but this chapter had to be done from scratch. As compensation, however, the next chapter is already all written, bar a bit of tidying up, and should be up in a week or two.

* * *

**16: VOICE RECOGNITION**

It was remarkable how quickly lying half bare like this had become a source of comfort instead of fear; but Hermione's kind warmth was nothing like his abusers' sweaty insistence, and her touch somehow seemed at least partially to cancel the other out. The warm dry silk of her skin, sliding against his, made him feel for a while as if he might really be clean again (or as clean as he had ever been), and not forever contaminated by their sweat and their relentless, pawing hands.

As they lay together quietly, his open robes wrapped loosely around both of them to keep out the March winds, and Crookshanks's heavy weight pinning their feet to the mattress, even desire seemed unimportant as the smooth heat of Hermione's body pressed close against his, warming the cold shiver in his belly and easing the frozen tension from his battered bones.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"And you're sure that the voice you heard was a Ravenclaw?"

"Moderately sure." He looked at the girl where she sat cross-legged on his stone work-table, nibbling on the skein of black and red liquorice which she wore twisted round her neck like a necklace, her grey-blonde hair escaping from its ties and a book on magical cryptozoology open across her knees, and sighed. "Neither myself, Professor McGonagall nor Professor Sprout recognized the - the voice of the girl who spoke, other than the vague familiarity one would expect to feel at the voice of any current student. Since it's likely that a house-master or mistress would recognise one of his or her own students..."

"And Professor Flitwick is away doing something extra-top-secret for the Order of the Phoenix" Lovegood replied, with her brightest and most open smile.

"How do you -? Never mind." Filius was not even officially an Order member, owing to his great age; but Albus trusted him and would call on his expertise where needed.

"I know everything," she replied, with a curling smile, and Snape snorted with amusement.

"'Everything' irrespective of whether it's actually true or not!"

"'Them as believes nothing'," Lovegood replied gravely, obviously quoting something, "'is seldom disappointed, but they do miss a lot of action.' So - do you want me to take a look at your memory, then, and see if I can tell who it is?"

He recoiled instinctively, his whole body flinching before he could suppress it. Clamping his nerves down ruthlessly he swallowed and then shook his head. "No. Definitely not. I couldn't possibly ask a student to look at such - material when there is no didactic purpose."

Lovegood made an irritated tsk-ing noise. "I do have an imagination you know" she said with some asperity. "I already know what they did to you - the gist of it, anyway. Actually seeing it won't make it any worse, particularly; and if students could _do_ that to you, I'm sure I can stand to see it."

She looked at him solemnly for a moment, and then reached out and patted his arm gently. "It won't make me think any less of you, really it won't. And I don't like thinking that students who are still at this school - girls who are in my house - did that to you, and I don't know who they are or whether I might be sitting next to them at lunch without knowing it."

"But - would you even be sure of recognising them? Out of all the female students in Ravenclaw?"

"Oh yes: I know all their voices. I listen to them when they don't know I'm there." She smiled a broad and faintly disturbing smile. "I listen to people a lot."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The blonde girl raised her face from the cloud-filled bowl and pushed it away from her. He wanted to be sick; his stomach knotted to ice and slime at the knowledge of what she had just seen and he wanted to crawl away somewhere and hide his shame but he forced himself to look at her, to see that hard, inward expression as her mouth tightened to a thin line and her rather prominent eyes narrowed. It occurred to him that even Bellatrix in full cry had never looked as deadly.

"Well?" he asked, forcing himself to sound brisk and competent although he was aware that he probably wasn't fooling anybody. "Did you recognise the speaker?" But then, he'd spent much of his life to date forcing himself to sound brisk and competent when he really wanted to crawl into a hole and throw up.

"Oh yes," Lovegood replied, still with that diamond-hard expression, although he realized it wasn't for him when she reached out without looking and looped her fingers lightly around his wrist, a loose tie tethering him to sanity (or what passed for it, in her case). "It's Padma Patil."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I'd prefer that you not tell Hermione Granger about this - identification, Severus."

Severus looked down at his hand, which was trembling and white to the point of transparency; blue veins showing like a road-map through the waxy skin. "I assure you, Albus, that Miss Granger is - trustworthy. And discreet."

"It's not her discretion which concerns me, but her acting ability. I put it to you: would she be able to share a room with Miss Patil - Parvati Patil, that is - and hear her speak about her twin, and not give away any sign that she knew that twin to be - under suspicion?"

"No - no, I suppose not."

"The same goes, I think, for Mr Longbottom."

Snape looked up and gave his friend a quizzical look, half serious and half amused. "You're not concerned about Luna Lovegood giving anything away, then?"

"I think we both know that there is no doubt about Miss Lovegood's acting ability."

"I take it you're going to leave Miss Patil free and - give her the rope to hang herself with?"

"Quite. Since we don't know who the - the other girl was, I thought it would be best to leave Miss Patil free for a few weeks to see whom she contacts."

"And you can't legally justify using Legilimency or Veritaserum on her against her will, on the basis of something as flimsy as a snatch of a voice taken from the memory of a man who was - dazed - and..." He pressed his knuckles against his mouth, trying to fight the sudden surge of nausea, and Albus sat down at his side with a rather fussy gesture, and gathered him into the crook of his uninjured left arm. Snape leaned into the reassuring contact, squinting his eyes half-shut to screen out the sight of Albus's latest sartorial atrocity. The sight of so much lime-green satin studded with magenta hibiscus flowers was doing nothing for his stomach.

"I have to pull myself together," he muttered. "Horace has asked me to mark all his third-year essays on Exhilerating Elixir by this afternoon, and I still have seventeen of the damnable things to plough through. I'm tempted to offer to test it on myself: it might bring me out of this - idiotic shaking fit."

"I must confess I am concerned about Horace pushing so much of his workload onto you, when you are still far from well."

"I'm just grateful that I refused to handle the sixth and seventh-year essays from the outset, because of the - potential for accusations of favouritism. I don't know what I should do if I had to mark Padma Patil's..." He began to shake again, even held within the hoop of his friend's arm. "Oh God, Albus, was I so - so loathsome as a teacher, or so disgusting as a man, that my students felt justified in -?"

"Hush, now. You are quite safe, and whatever Miss Patil's motives were, I doubt they were directly personal. You may have made your students want to punch you in the eye occasionally, but I doubt that any of them would wish to..." He gestured eloquently at his friend's terrible injuries. "Be at peace now. Whatever her motives, I very much doubt that they were due to any fault of yours."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Neville said that you've been having bouts of being obsessed with the idea your skin feels dirty, leik."

"Neville should keep his damned impertinent observations to himself" the older man snapped, glaring at Adrian under his formidably winged brows.

"Got to have my spies, haven't I?" Adrian replied complacently around a mouthful of pizza. "_You'll_ certainly never tell me."

"And what would be the point if I did? You can hardly - make me clean again."

"Stop fishing for reassurance, ya tube: you know nobody but you thinks you're dirty."

"Unfortunately, it is my opinion that counts."

"I guess: but as for _feeling_ dirty, I mean your skin, I wonder if it isn't more neurological than psychological."

"You mean... nerve-damage of some kind?"

"Mm. I know Poppy healed your lesions, better and much faster than a Muggle Burns Unit could have done, but even so - injured nerves take a long time to recover fully, years, and I wonder if it isn't just that your skin still feels funny, leik, everywhere it was burned."

"But I feel so - " He looked down, picking at the blanket fretfully. "I feel so dirty in myself, not just my skin, so - used."

"Well, that's probably inevitable, under the - well. Under the circumstances. It's bound to take you a while to get your sense of self properly back together. But I think you may be making it worse by interpreting a purely physical symptom as if it was proof of your own neurosis."

"Thank you so bloody much for that."

Adrian stretched and yawned, discreetly covering his mouth with his hand, and Snape looked at him with an annoyance not unmixed with envy. Newly returned from a week-long honeymoon in Prague, the young surgeon looked simultaneously sleepy and smug.

"Don't be daft. You're allowed to have neuroses after everything that happened last year: it would be a bloody miracle if you didn't. But I wish you'd let me refer you to - "

"No. Thank you, but - no. Quite apart from the security aspects, I prefer to deal with these things in my own way."

"Fair enough, I guess, but... Y'know, sometimes I get the feeling you don't really want to get well."

"That's ridiculous Addy and you know it!"

"Do I, then? What does being well mean to you - seriously, leik?"

"Independence; self-sufficiency; being able to stand on my own two feet - even if they aren't my own flesh and blood anymore. Having to stand on my own feet. Isolation. Loneliness - damn."

"I'm sure - now they've noticed that they like you, your friends won't abandon you just because you're no longer so - so dependent on them. I certainly won't stop seeing you: just change the venue a bit, leik. There's some very fine pubs I want to introduce you to, once you can stand up well enough to fall down again."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Harry Potter usually erupted, plunged or charged through doors. Upon occasion he might stride, if he was trying to look dignified. This time, presented with his former Professor's door, he had suddenly and miraculously acquired the ability to sidle guiltily. He appeared around the door more quietly than anyone who knew him would have given him credit for.

"Potter," Snape said flatly, as he caught sight of the trademark lavatory-brush hair and stunned-bushbaby spectacles. By a supreme effort of will he managed to keep his tone merely dubious rather than outright hostile.

Hermione, with whom he had been having a quiet game of cards, looked almost as surprised to see Potter as Potter did to see her.

"Oh. Uh." Potter rubbed a hand nervously through his hair. "I thought Neville... I mean, it looks like you're busy. I can come back later."

The corners of Snape's long lips actually twitched up, very slightly. "Unfortunately, Professor Sprout called Longbottom away half an hour ago, to assist with some guerilla re-potting. Apparently the Striated Strangleweed had got the Honking Hogweed in a head-lock."

"Well. That's... bad, I guess." Potter shuffled his feet. "Uhm... could I maybe have a quiet word?"

Hermione suddenly stopped looking puzzled and started looking both proud and very amused instead. "Of course. We're not busy."

"Er... I meant with Professor Snape," Potter said, giving Snape an unwontedly pleading look. Whatever he wanted to say, he clearly did not want to say it in front of Hermione.

"I'm sure whatever you wish to say can be said in front of Miss Granger," Snape said smoothly. He was surprised to find that he actually felt a little guilty about ignoring Potter's pleading expression: but not half as guilty as he would feel if he deprived Hermione of the chance to witness Potter's chagrin when he sprang the identity of the mysterious Half-Blood Prince on him. "Unless, of course, you are volunteering to be the one to hold me if I should chance to have a panic attack?"

Harry shot him a look of nervous horror. "Er... no, that's all right. Hermione can stay."

"Hermione had every intention of staying," Hermione said, giving Harry the sort of look that weary older sisters have been bestowing on irritating younger brothers since time immemorial - a mixture of affection, exasperation, and amusement. "Go on, Harry."

"Well... uh..." Harry looked around at the tapestries, apparently seeking inspiration. "I thought I should... well, Hermione thought... I mean, I thought it too, but she's better at... at things than I am..."

"Miss Granger is better at a great many things than you are, Potter," Snape said silkily. Not, in his opinion, that it was _hard_ to be better at most things than Potter: but he decided, for once, not to say it, in the interests of preventing the conversation from degenerating into the usual tedious hostilities.

And the boy had saved his life, after all. For an instant, he had a sense of absolute vertigo - of awareness of how far he had come, from the abject, degraded, dying thing which Potter's stubborn refusal to accept the inevitable had saved, to sitting here clean and safe and warm, fed and rested and hardly in any pain (the residual aches scarcely even registered any more) and sort-of-very-nearly-sane in his own rooms in his nice new robes, playing cards with an honest-to-God sort-of-very-nearly-an-actual-girlfriend and indulging in a little light Potter-baiting. The sudden warm rush of happiness and - ye gods - gratitude left him feeling positively light-headed.

"You wished to say something to me, Potter?" he said encouragingly, taking pity on the boy's discomfort; and then, because he was still Snape, added: "Or were you just looking for an antidote to the Babbling Curse?"

Harry relaxed slightly at that. "If I did, I'd have asked Hermione. She's been unhexing me and uncursing me and stuff for years." He looked around the room again, and then at his own feet. "I just... uh... look, I know we've had our differences, and I reckon you - " He caught Hermione's eye and almost visibly changed tack in mid-sentence. "I mean, you and I both deserved some of it, because we've been... uh... a bit intolerant and all that, me and you both..."

"You mean that you treated me like an automaton without rights or feelings, and despised me for trying to protect you from the consequences of your own stupidity" Snape snapped. Took a deep breath. Tried to recapture that fleeting sense of happiness and gratitude. "And I, I will admit, was far more - more aware of, and infuriated by, your laziness and lack of manners than I would have been had it not been for your unfortunate resemblance to your father, with all the - history between us."

"I mean that I've been a prat and you've been a bloody bastard," Harry said, a bit of spirit finally showing. "And I am sorry about that, a bit, believe it or not. I know I've been unfair to you - I even knew it at the time, sometimes. But you've been just as bloody unfair a few times, even if I did give you more reason to be." He took a deep breath. "The thing is - I mean, the thing I came in here to apologize for is - the Pensieve. That went a long way beyond being a prat, and I'm sorry. I really am. I didn't..." He ran a hand through his hair again. "I know it sounds stupid, but it didn't even occur to me that it might be anything... personal. I was so frustrated with all the secrets, and all the half-truths, and what with you being in the Order... I thought it was more of the things I was supposedly too young to know. Something poor wee Harry should be protected from for his own bloody good."

"'Poor wee Harry' had the bloody - had Riddle looking out of his eyes like a human bloody _periscope_. If I _had_ been hiding anything - politically sensitive, and He had seen it through you, I would have been dead meat."

"I know that - I just didn't think of it at the time. I wasn't thinking of a lot of things, at the time. But wasn't it more dangerous to leave that sort of stuff in your head where I might accidentally - well, you know, break into it, the way I did with...?"

"The way you saw my charming parents having a delightful little at-home _tête-à-tête_? But that was just one of the memories I leave out as bait, so that anyone seeing it will think they've broken through into the real me..." He smirked. "If He couldn't break through my shields and find the real me, I'm damned sure you couldn't..." and trailed off, flinching. "At least, He - didn't, until he had me taken apart by experts. And you may be many things, Potter, most of them damned annoying, but I never marked you down as a torturer." As Hermione leaned forwards, quietly solicitous, and rested her hand over his, he muttered under his breath, almost too soft to hear, "Not like your father".

Hermione squeezed his hand gently. "He's trying," she whispered just as quietly.

Potter winced, though he couldn't have heard their whispered exchange. "No, I'm not a torturer, I'd never - do that."

He was uncomfortably aware that he had come close to it with Snape, a few times - had fantasized about making him writhe and jerk under _Crucio_, and it didn't seem remotely amusing any more. Still, he hadn't actually done it and he thought - hoped - that he wouldn't have. "And... I'm sorry, I really am. About prying into your memories, and seeing something I know you didn't want me or anyone to see." He looked down at his feet again. "If it makes you feel any better, finding out my Dad was like a better-looking, more intelligent version of Dudley was a punishment all by itself." He said the name "Dudley" as if it meant "Blast-Ended Skrewt" or something equally unpleasant.

"That would be your cousin; the one who makes Vincent Crabbe look dainty and refined?"

"That's Dudley." Harry scowled. "Only imagine he's the leader of his little gang, has started proper boxing training, and is unburdened by Crabbe's biting intellect."

Snape gave a little huff of laughter, and the beginnings of a grin flickered across his face. It was the first time he'd ever seen anything in Potter that he might actually like; but creative verbal bitchiness had always been one of his favourite pastimes, and one of the main planks of his friendship with Albus, insofar as what he had had with Albus prior to his immolation could be termed friendship. Then memory caught up with him, and he scowled.

"Your father and Black would have been easier to take if they'd been less intelligent: it might have made their cruelty less - inventive. And I could never, never get away from the bastards. I never knew how they did it, it used to drive me mad - nearly literally. I never knew they'd invented a device for spying on everybody in the castle, and I shudder to think what other uses they put it to."

"I - I don't think they..." Harry started lamely, and Snape raised his eyebrows.

"Come, now. Do you honestly imagine that Pettigrew, at least, would have resisted to urge to use the map to find out who was shagging whom in the fourth-floor linen closet? And they used it to home in on me like a pack of stoats on a rabbit." The grin flickered again, with an edge of smugness. "I will say, however, that in one respect your father and Black were less of a problem than your hulking thug of a cousin. Neither of them could punch worth a damn; as I proved on more than one occasion."

He looked at the boy speculatively for a moment, his head tilted to one side so that he looked like an inquisitive rook. Then he jerked his head towards the kettle in the corner. "Since you're here, Potter, you might as well make the tea. There should be enough for three." He gave Hermione a guardedly neutral look, wondering whether he was doing a good job in her eyes, or not.

Hermione smiled at him, and then her smile widened as her eyes tracked over to Potter. "Can you manage, Harry?"

Harry rolled his eyes and grinned at her. "Hermione, I make an _excellent_ cup of tea. You know that." He headed over to the kettle. They had a tea-service more or less permanently set up in the corner of Snape's room, so nobody had to leave his sight to get some - or summon a house elf each and every time.

"I really do," he added, apparently detecting a shred of doubt in Snape's expression. "I've been doing it since I was big enough to lift a kettle. I can cook, too - mostly breakfast and lunch, Aunt Petunia generally did dinner herself. Another year or two, though..." He shrugged, busying himself with the tea things. "I'm not completely helpless, no matter what everyone seems to think. I may not be able to duel with Snake-Face yet, but I can take care of myself."

Hermione nodded, giving Snape's hand a gentle squeeze. "He'd make a much better housewife than I would, actually," she whispered, giving Harry a proud look. "You should see him clean. He can get a shine on a toilet bowl that even my mum couldn't."

"I'm not a bad cook myself." He pulled a wry face, half dour and half mocking. "When Dads was dead-drunk in the front room and Mums had locked herself in to have histrionics in the bedroom, it was cook or starve. But I prefer brewing." He paused, looking thoughtful. "That reminds me: when I was... taken I had three demijohns of cowslip wine on the go in that cupboard at the end of the Potions corridor. I wonder if they're still there?"

"Wine?" Harry filled the teapot and turned to give Snape a thoughtful look. "I haven't heard anything about it, and I usually would, so it's probably still where you left it. Would it still be any good? I don't know anything about wine, except that it tastes awful. Aunt Petunia's and Uncle Vernon's did, anyway. Is it hard to make?"

"It will either have improved with age, or blown its fermentation locks and coated the inside of the cupboard with yeast and alcohol. It remains to be seen which." He tilted his head back against the back of the sofa and looked down his long nose at the boy. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that your palate is too unsophisticated for wine, Potter; or perhaps," he added fairly, "that your relatives are too stingy to buy anything better than vinegar and horse-piss. But I could teach you to catch summer in a glass and the sun in a bottle, if you were willing to learn."

He smiled his fleeting, there-and-gone smile. "After all, we know that if you will only apply yourself you are _capable_ of learning what I wish to teach you..." The smile spread, baring his yellow teeth in a shark's grin as he finished softly, "...since I gather you have found my notes invaluable in your quest to pull the wool over Horace Slughorn's eyes..."

Harry blinked at him. "Aah - I don't - " He looked at Hermione in confusion and she smiled encouragingly.

"He means the Half-Blood Prince's book, Harry."

Harry put the teapot down, very carefully, and then sat down on the rag rug in front of the fire, his arms wrapped around his updrawn knees, and looked from one to the other. "You mean to tell me that _he_ is - that that book is... and you didn't _tell_ me?"

"I've only known it myself since Friday," Hermione said apologetically, "and, well, S- Professor Snape wanted to be the first to tell you, and it _is_ his book, so..."

Snape smiled his shark-like, politician's smile again. "And I was so flattered, Potter, to hear that you held my younger self in such... regard."

"Yes, well," Harry snapped, "you've changed a lot - _sir_. It's not surprising I didn't recognize you."

Snape flashed him a fleeting smirk, more natural this time and less like something on the hunt for prey. "_Touché_, Potter. I will admit to having changed, and not necessarily for the better. But I like to think I've kept my sense of humour." He considered the boy thoughtfully: the brat had been at least trying to be reasonably pleasant, for once, and it would be a pity to waste it for a punchline: however satisfying. "I should apologise to you, this time," he said abruptly, "for setting you up to receive my little bombshell: but you'll appreciate that I don't get out much at present. I have to make my own amusements where I find them."

"Yeah, well..." Harry scuffed his foot against the rag rug. "Can't argue with that, I s'pose." He sounded as if he'd like to. Then he sighed. "So much for hoping the Prince would have liked me," he mumbled. He sounded surly, if you only listened to the tone, but for once he was close enough and it was quiet enough that Snape caught the actual words to that mutinous mutter.

"You wouldn't have had much in common with him, Potter," Snape said abruptly. Potter looked up, his eyes widening in evident hurt, and the older man sighed. "But that's true of you and Granger here, isn't it, and you seem to manage. He - that boy - he would have liked anybody who seemed to like _him_, I think, but you probably wouldn't even have given him the time of day - being a Slytherin, and therefore already tainted in the eyes of every other bloody house." He rubbed tiredly at his eyes, unconsciously finishing by running his knuckles up and down the scar which bisected his cheek.

"You know when I started at Hogwarts, I was so stupid that I thought that your father and Black - everyone said they were good students, they got high marks at almost every subject the same way I did, I didn't even know that Slytherins don't mix with Gryffindors and I was so stupid I thought that if they were swots like me I might be able to talk to them, show them the spells I'd been working on, that they might like me for being clever instead of jeering at me the way the brats at primary school did but they just... They weren't interested in what we were studying for its own sake, you understand, just for what use they could put it to, they thought I was - hilarious because I actually read books on magic and potions in my spare time, and I - I didn't realize how ridiculous I was, this ignorant, half-blood brat, exclaiming in wonder at things every pure-blood had grown up with from the cradle - as ridiculous as Arthur waxing lyrical over laundrettes and letter-boxes. But they soon put me right. They soon let me know exactly what a bloody laughing-stock I was."

Harry shrugged, and gave him a wry, lopsided little grin. "That's what put me off Slytherin, you know." When Snape blinked at him, he slid into a crosslegged position on the rug, resting his elbows on his knees. "Hagrid took me to get my robes and books and things, before I started. My aunt and uncle didn't want me to go to Hogwarts at all, and they certainly wouldn't have spent any money on it. They weren't even going to buy me a uniform for the comprehensive." He shrugged again. "I ran into Draco in Madam Malkin's. All the time we were getting robes fitted, he was going on about how he didn't think people who weren't from wizarding families should even be allowed into Hogwarts, because they didn't know wizarding ways and things. And he talked about a lot of stuff like Quidditch that I couldn't make head or tail of and I had to pretend I understood."

"I never knew you'd met Draco before the train," Hermione said quietly.

"Oh, I did... and then on the train it was more of the same. Told me I didn't want to sit with someone poor and common like Ron, when I'd spent my whole life being even more poor and common than that, sucking up just because of some stupid scar that I didn't even realize was important." Harry shrugged again. "And then he got sorted into Slytherin and Ron and Fred and George said they weren't surprised because they're all like that, and I thought they'd know, so... I dunno, maybe we would have got on. Sounds like you started out the same way I did, but going the other way."

Snape looked at him with renewed interest. "Draco has a certain amount of real prejudice against Muggle-borns and half-bloods; with his family background it could hardly be otherwise which, in fairness, I suppose was also true of Black. But mostly - he probably wouldn't thank me for saying this but he was terrified of coming to Hogwarts: he'd been home-schooled and he'd hardly even met another child socially before he got on that train. If you let him think you understood what he was talking about he'll have assumed you were a pure-blood like him, so he probably thought that by running down Muggle-borns to you he was, ah, 'sucking up' to you."

Harry blinked. "You think he was trying to _impress_ me?"

"I would think so, yes - especially after he found out who you were: he was certainly terribly crestfallen when the famous Harry Potter slapped him down on the train. That was part of why I - and we didn't know, either of us, that you hadn't had any wizarding education at all. If I had known I wouldn't have been so - offended by your inability to answer a simple question about potion ingredients that any wizard child could have at least hazarded a guess at, but I thought that you were simply - well, scorning the subject, and me, the way you had scorned my godson. And, ah, scorning your mother's memory, since she was outstandingly gifted at Potions." Nearly as outstandingly gifted as himself: but he forbore from saying so.

"Yes; Slug - Professor Slughorn said she was good. But I never knew - I never knew anything about her, before I started at Hogwarts." He shuffled sideways a bit, away from the fire which was becoming uncomfortably hot, and looked at Snape quizzically. "If, um, you minded whether I was scorning my mother's memory or not, why did you call her a - " He glanced at Hermione and flushed slightly. "You know."

"Oh, really, Potter, you're old enough to know what it feels like to want to impress a girl - unless your taste runs to boys! You must be able to understand what it feels like to want to impress a pretty girl with how bloody _sophisticated_ you are, and then be seen by her in the most embarrassing - "

"Um, yeah. I used to have this really huge crush on Cho Chang, and she walked in on me once just after Neville's pet _Mimbulus mimbletonia_ showered me with Stinksap." He raised his eyebrows. "So, um, does that mean that you and my mum...?"

"Not in so many words. But she was my friend, since we were children - my only friend, for a long time, and most of the other friends I made since turned out to be..." His mouth tightened as he made a wordless gesture indicating the scars which decorated it. "And she was - well, the only person I could actually talk to about Potions, apart from Horace Slughorn. I should have been content with that I suppose but she was - lovely. Every boy in the school, practically, wanted to impress her. Having her see me - like that - " He grimaced. "I suppose I should be grateful that she didn't stay to see me actually stripped. It's mortifying enough to know that you saw..."

"Um. I didn't, actually. I didn't see that much of the memory, just - up to when they were threatening to - you know. I never knew whether they did or not." He looked down, colouring slightly and fiddling with a strand of the rug. "I'm sorry," he muttered. He looked up again in time to see Snape give him a tiny nod of acknowledgement, his mouth tightening at the corners as he did so.

"I'm more sorry than you could believe that I lost what little self-control I had left at that point and insulted your mother when she was trying to help me," Snape replied soberly, "especially since - since I lost her friendship along with that self-control, and her friendship was... of great value to me. But - well, quite apart from being nearly ready to drop dead from shear bloody embarrassment, I was bloody terrified. Slytherin House at that time had more Death Eater sympathisers than all the other houses put together, and even those that weren't were nearly all pure-bloods, and I was this scrawny, penniless, _common_ little half-blood, stuck there in the middle: I might as well have painted a bloody target on my back.

"I did have a few friends in Slytherin, of a sort," (of the sort who had later become prominent among his torturers, his abusers), "but they weren't the sort that could be relied on for backup - as they proved when they stood by while your bloody father dangled me upside-down and stripped me. I knew right then, if I hadn't known it before, that I was on my own as far as my own house went. I just about managed to hold my own because by that point they all knew I could come up with hexes and poisons they didn't know the antidote to, but if I'd let myself be publicly rescued by a Muggle-born, Gryffindor girl - God." He pressed his hand against his mouth, an unconscious, nervous gesture, staring at Potter over the back of it. "At least your father and Black couldn't get at me while I was sleeping."

Harry shuddered sympathetically. "When we were in first year, and lost all those points... I hardly dared go to sleep at night, and the worst I could expect from Gryffindor was a bit of a thumping."

Hermione nodded. "It was just as bad in the girls' dormitories. I can quite see why you wouldn't want to risk it." She smiled at Snape, the tender smile reserved just for him. "As for Draco... he's awfully good at _seeming_ self-assured. I was completely convinced until I slapped him in third year and he squeaked and sloped off."

Harry snickered, and didn't seem the slightest bit put off by Snape's chilly look. "It was funny. It really was. There was Hermione, the smallest out of all of us even with the hair, and Malfoy and Crabbe and Goyle all scampering off. If it had been me or Ron there'd have been a fight, again, and we'd have lost, again. But Hermione actually scared them off. It was hilarious."

"I didn't scare them off," Hermione said, putting her nose in the air. "You just don't hit girls, that's all. They knew that just as well as you did."

"Was that it?" Harry blinked. "I thought it was just the shock. You're so quiet, usually, that it was like seeing someone get savaged by a kitten." He paused, and his face softened a bit. "You know, you're a bit like my mum. Not to look at, but leaping in and shouting at people and not being at all impressed by things like how cool someone is or how good he is at Quidditch. You'd probably have got him," he jerked his head in Snape's direction, "into even more trouble than she did. It takes more than being rude to you to get rid of _you_. I know. I've tried."

"And you're lucky it didn't work, too. You only ever try to ditch me when you think something's going to be dangerous, and that's just when you need an eye kept on you."

"It's a dirty job," Snape said with a smirk, "but somebody's got to do it. Weren't you going to make the tea, Potter? I'd do it myself, but somehow magicked tea is never as good as the kind you brew yourself." When Potter had uncoiled to his feet in an annoyingly athletic and assured way and returned to the teapot, he gave Hermione a fond smile while the boy's back was turned. "If you'd rescued me, I probably wouldn't have got into too much trouble, so long as I made a show of _trying_ to see you off: everybody would know that I'd had no choice in the matter once you'd taken me up as a Cause." And then added, very softly so Potter wouldn't hear it over the hiss of the kettle, "And even if I had got into trouble for it, it might have been worth it."

Hermione smiled, and when Harry was turned away she kissed her fingertips and brushed them against Snape's scarred cheek. "Well, nobody ever gave Harry trouble about spending time with a girl, as far as I know, and boys usually do. They seem to accept me as a sort of force of nature." He gave her a tight, fleeting smile in return and wondered if Potter was right. If it had been Hermione all those years ago, and not Lily, would she have continued to defend him, even after his unforgivable insult? Would she have accepted his abject, stammering apologies, as Lily had not, and not thrown him over, as Lily had?

"You _are_ a force of nature. Well, a force of something. Intellect, maybe." Harry handed her a cup of tea. "I bet you've noticed, right?" He grinned at Snape, in what might be a fleeting moment of masculine cameraderie, while passing his cup. "I mean, I know you didn't ask her to join in looking after you. I asked her for help just once and next thing you know she's giving Professor Dumbledore orders and fussing over you just as badly as she does over me. There's no stopping her once she's decided to do things for your own good."

"Harry, you make me sound like some sort of... of meddling harridan like Umbridge who won't listen to anyone!" Hermione bit her lip. "I'm not like that, am I?"

"No!" Harry waved his hands in what was probably meant to be a placating gesture. "Umbridge was just a rotten cow who wanted everything her own way. You... care about people. A lot. And you won't stop even when they're awful to you, or being idiots, or trying to fend you off so you'll stop trying to protect them from their own stupidity." He smiled ruefully. "And I am glad that didn't work, since I'd certainly have died a horrible death at the Department of Mysteries if you'd let me go off alone."

Snape looked away, carefully. "And I, likewise, am very glad of her... assistance. Even the fussing." He frowned, tapping his long fingers on his cup. "It's probably pointless to point out, at this stage, that if you had been guided by me in Occlumency that whole fiasco at the Ministry would never have occurred; and in any case I bear part of the blame for having allowed my - disturbance over the Pensieve incident to get in the way of my professional duty to teach. If you would ever have bloody-well agreed to learn. And besides - "

He looked back at Potter then, feeling very tired. "It was probably for the best, since it forced the Ministry to acknowledge the fact of Riddle's return, even though it led to my - immolation and to - I did try to save him," he said abruptly. "I know you think that I - that I was glad of his death but I did try to save Black, the same way you tried to save your bullying thug of a cousin from the Dementors. The only difference is that you succeeded and I - failed."

Harry squirmed uncomfortably on his chair. "Yeah, well: it was safer to blame you than to blame Kreacher, wasn't it?"

"I fail to see - "

"Kreacher was in my power, wasn't he - I could do _anything_ to the little shit. Anything I liked. I could order him to do anything to himself, and he'd bloody do it." He met the other man's burning-black eyes, steadily. "You were right. Sir. I'm not a torturer - and I don't ever want to be."

"He's right," Hermione said quietly into the sudden, charged silence. "As far as I know, he's never done anything worse to Kreacher than be a bit sharp with him."

Snape put his cup down and looked down again, letting his hair flop forwards to hide his face as he turned his narrow hand this way and that and stared at it as if fascinated. "There are times when I've had to be," he said quietly. "Had to be a bloody torturer, to preserve my cover. But God, I didn't want to - the only way I could do it was to imagine that it was _Him_ that I was hurting, and pray he didn't see that in my mind." He looked up then, staring rather wildly at and through both of them. "Oh, God, I never wanted to - "

"We know that." Hermione slid an arm around his shoulder, snuggling against his side. "Shhh... don't fret over it now, it's long past. And you'll never have to again, ever."

Harry, for a wonder, didn't look either disdainful or pitying. "I never wanted to either, that was the trouble. If I'd blamed Kreacher, if I'd taken to punishing him... I was afraid I wouldn't _want_ to stop. It'd be the first step, you know?"

Snape nodded jerkily. "Yes. When I - it was part of why I joined the Death Eaters, I was so - I wanted to strike back, to hurt the people who had hurt _me_. But I saw, I saw the others, Rosier, Avery, boys I'd been at school with, I saw how once they'd started to learn how to hurt they didn't want to stop and I didn't want to be like that." Avery's desire to hurt, indeed, was still a raw and recent wound, and his mouth tightened at the sting of memory.

"Regulus, too: he was a cocky little pure-blood who thought he was better than everybody else but when it came to it, when he saw what they were really doing, he didn't want to be like that. He wanted to patronize Muggle-borns and half-bloods and keep them as servants but he didn't want to hurt them. He didn't want to hurt anybody." The phrase "Unlike his brother" hung on the air, unspoken.

Harry nodded. "I understand that. I do. I've... there's been times when I've been tempted." He looked down into his tea. "I used _Crucio_ once. Just once. It didn't work properly."

"Was that during the Ministry battle?"

"Yes," Harry said shortly. "Bellatrix."

Snape raised his eyebrows. "In that case, I would think your impulse was entirely understandable. And the fact that it didn't 'work properly' - well, the fact that it worked at all shows you were getting the inflection and the gestures right, and loathe as I am to admit it, you've never been lacking in raw power. So it must be a deficiency of concentration and will which caused the spell to fail: and frankly, if you can't summon the will to really want to hurt that slavering, sadistic - you'll probably never really want to hurt anybody, except in self-defence." He looked at the boy thoughtfully for a moment, and then gestured at the cards lying abandoned on the occasional table in front of the couch. "Would you like us to deal you in?"

Harry blinked at him for a moment, and then smiled. He had never smiled sincerely at Snape before, and the unselfconscious grin lessened his unsettling resemblance to his father. James, conscious of his dignity, had never looked so much like a small child presented with an unexpected treat. "I'd like that. Thanks."

Hermione explained the rules in her "bossy" voice as she dealt, and Harry's grin widened. Snape eyed him with caution: a caution which was only reinforced when the little brute managed to double Blackjack him during the second game and he felt called on, reluctantly impressed, to say "Shot!" and then stiff him with the fourth Two at the earliest opportunity. But then, Blackjack had always been a fierce game, and if it provided an outlet for their ancient hostility, that was probably a Good Thing.

They had just finished the sequence, and Snape had come out ahead by the skin of his teeth with eleven winning points after twelve surprizingly hard-fought games, when Neville came in, late and a little battered but looking very pleased. While Harry was distracted by greeting Neville, Hermione stood up, surreptitiously brushed her fingertips over her lips again and touched them to Snape's cheek as she moved away. She had a quiet word with Neville - the phrase "very civil" was audible if you were trying to eavesdrop. He looked at the two dark-haired men, the older and the younger, and grinned, and they shot him matching glowers which made him grin all the wider.

"I suppose," Hermione said reluctantly, "that I'd better get back up to the common room and finish my Transfiguration essay. Now that Neville's back."

"I'd - ah, better come with you," Harry said hastily, still uncertain about being left with Snape without Hermione to protect him.

Hermione's lips quirked. "He won't eat you, you know. But you can come with me if you like: I want to be there when you tell Ron who the Half-Blood Prince really is. Please?"

"Yeah, well, that's..." Harry scuffed his shoe on the hard stone floor, and Neville looked at him with interest.

"Oh, really? Who is it?"

"Long story. You'd better - uh - ask Professor Snape about it," Harry muttered. He gave Snape a nervous, uncertain smile. "Well, goodbye sir, it's been - very interesting."

Snape quirked an eyebrow at him and smiled his flicker of a smile. "It's been absolutely fascinating, Potter. Do come again." The amazing thing was, he found he meant it. For the first time he had some inkling as to why Hermione had always seemed to enjoy the boy's presence. When he wasn't being sullen and resentful, Harry Potter could actually be rather good company.

And wasn't _that_ an amazing thought. Not just that he could spend over an hour with Potter and hardly want to kill him at all, but that he was even considering weighing people up as potential companions, just like a normal, acceptable person with actual friends and an actual social life. Almost as amazing as the idea of going to a pub with Adrian for no purpose except that he enjoyed the boy's company and Adrian, inexplicably, seemed to enjoy his.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"You're kidding me mate, right?"

"No, honestly, the Half-Blood Prince is - "

"This is a wind-up; it has to be. I mean, come on - _Snape_?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Is it true?" the blonde boy snapped, pacing the room like a cut-price panther.

"Is what true?" Snape said warily.

"That it was that - that - arrogant-overbearing-stuck-up-pea-brained-muscle-bound-sweaty Gryffindor throwback McLaggen and two _current students_ who brought you into the castle and dumped you in that - that - I can't even _say_ it."

"It's called a 'store-room', Draco."

"It's called a fucking 'torture-chamber' - I can't even go in there." Draco shuddered, going to shove his hands into his pockets and missing because the pockets on the jeans were higher and further forward than he was used to. He folded his arms instead, scowling.

"Don't be foolish. I could understand it if I had died there but, demonstrably, I did not; and you need to be able to go into the student supply-cupboard. You can't expect other people to be forever fetching things for you - amusing as it might have been to get Potter to do so in third year." He rubbed distractedly at the scar across his cheek, feeling the slight rasp of returning stubble. "But yes, it - it seems to have been McLaggen and two current female students who - conveyed me in."

"When I find out who they are, I'm going to _kill_ them - I swear this."

Snape wasn't sure whether to be touched, amused or alarmed by Draco's passionate protectiveness. "Whatever happened to Not Hitting Girls?"

"I'll make an exception in their case, I swear I will."

"Then it is perhaps fortunate that I was unable to identify the pair of them" Snape said smoothly. This was probably not a good moment to point out that up until he had seen it applied to the living flesh of someone he was fond of, Draco had accepted the torture of dissidents from the Death Eater ranks as self-evidently necessary and right. "How did you find out, anyway?" He knew the Slytherin guards at his door had been briefed by Albus that two of his attackers were probably still on the premises, and to be especially wary of young, female visitors; but he didn't think McLaggen had been mentioned by name.

"All the guards know. I think maybe Longbottom warned them in case - you know, in case that _bastard_ sneaked back into the school on a pretend visit to his girlfriend or something." The scowl deepened. "I almost wish he would, so we could catch him and - "

"I will certainly be easier in my mind when we have identified both of his - associates." He patted the couch next to him. "Sit down now, do: we still have a lot of catching up to do on basic healing potions and on advanced antidotes."

As his godson stalked across the room, all wounded fury and protective rage encased in blue denim and white trainers, Snape quirked an eyebrow at him. "How are you finding the - ah - Muggle clothes?"

"They make me feel as if my legs have been starched," Draco said ruefully, "and I don't even want to consider what they're doing to my, um, personal areas. But they do have their compensations."

"How so?"

Draco's expression was a very adolescent mix of embarrassment and pride. "As I was coming down the corridor, Millicent whistled at my bum."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Lying curled up against Hermione like this, breathing in gently in the quiet early morning, he could smell the faint coconut perfume of the shampoo she used and that scent reached straight down into his hind-brain and dragged up recollection like the rotting timbers of a shipwreck - the memory of himself twisting mindlessly as hot needles jabbed through every trembling nerve and jeering voices - Cormac McLaggen's voice, Padma Patil's voice, the shrill, mocking laughter he could not identify - echoed around him and the greying sky swung and wheeled over his upturned face; of needing desperately to scream and not even being allowed to whimper as the blinding agony of his opened belly burned him up without ever consuming him, blazing on and on through an eternity without limit, however frantically he prayed to die, and of a singsong voice and blunt, black fingers that whisked the worst of the pain away at a stroke; of scorching, stinging fire across his skin and the same kind touch moving from place to place, laying something rubbery and odd across that burning that dulled it down to mere discomfort; of a hot, bright point of pain on the inside of his elbow that somehow brought water and food into his parched system; a unicorn -

God, he remembered it, Hagrid's comforting growl and the white beast shining in his eyes like the moon, Minerva making him a blanket of warm air and Adrian's square fingers smoothing salve across his dry, bleeding lips, and he had been so tired, so unimaginably tired and yet not able to sleep, but this was the next best thing: Hermione's small hands moving across his scalp, working that same coconut scent into his hair and brushing, soothing, talking quietly until he was floating easily on the soft surf of her voice, the first peace and the first ease he had had for four miserable interminable months but the careful hands and the steady voice knew what they were doing, he could let go of the strings of himself at last and just drift, and feel perfectly safe to do so...

Sighing, he tucked his head down against Hermione's shoulder, inhaling the warm scent of her hair, and drifted off to sleep again, smiling.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Rolanda Hooch clapped her hands sharply and walked backwards away from him, her yellow eyes alight with enthusiasm. "Come on - that's it! That's it! Once more!"

Breathlessly, he lurched towards her. It would be hyperbole, he thought, to call what he was doing "walking", since he still couldn't get the damned left leg to bend at the knee properly, but at least he was managing not to fall over as he inched his stiff, erratic way across the room for the third time.

"And... rest!"

He nodded once, too out of breath to reply, and folded down rather suddenly onto the wooden bench in front of the stone work-bench. What a confusing language English was, he thought distractedly, making one word do the duty of several! - but he knew how it felt. Right now, he felt as if he'd been doing the work of ten: but at least he had motivation. Even knowing that he would have to have an Order bodyguard with him for the foreseeable future, the prospect of going on a Geordie or Glaswegian pub-crawl with Adrian was a far better inducement than the promise of a return to teaching the dunderheads and lethal incompetents who made up two-thirds of any Hogwarts class.

And since when did he become the sort of person who saw an evening in someone else's company as a pleasure to be anticipated rather than a chore to be endured - and who had people around him who viewed his company the same way?

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"You wanted to talk to me, Headmaster?"

"Yes, I did. Really, Horace," the Headmaster said, looking down his long, crooked nose at his short friend as they strolled side-by-side along the fifth-floor corridor, "I know that you used to be Severus's House Master and you may feel that that still gives you a certain authority over him; but I really can't have you imposing on his good nature by getting him to do your work for you."

"But it's good for him," the other man replied complacently. "It makes him feel needed, and - well, you know how he is: he thinks that complaining about losing his limbs and so on would be unmanly. But moaning about me giving him too much work is permissible, and he does _so_ like to have something to complain about...

"Besides..." He fluffed his moustache out thoughtfully. "Isn't 'Severus's good nature' a bit of an oxymoron?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Severus covered his eyes with his hand, and rubbed tiredly at the bridge of his nose. "I do appreciate," he said with strained patience, "that the question has a certain academic interest; but trying to decide on the correct colour for nothingness is really not the point of the exercise."

"I'm sorry." Hermione ran a distracted hand through her hair. She was sure it was standing up almost on end, she'd done that so often. "I just can't seem to get the hang of thinking of _nothing_. I don't even know how to begin - I've spent my whole life trying to cram as much thinking in as I can. I've never tried to stop it before."

"You've never tried to find a - a point of stillness within yourself? What about when you stand in the owl tower watching the sun sink behind the forest, all that - fire and green darkness framed by a lacework of stone?" He coughed slightly. "For example."

Hermione smiled at that - his poetic side still surprised her a little sometimes, but she liked it. She had to shake her head, though. "Not really. Sometimes I'll have a peaceful moment, but even then I don't stop thinking entirely." She frowned, thinking back. "I think the closest I've come is with you, actually. When I wake up in the night, and you're still asleep, and it's all warm and comfortable and quiet. Then I just snuggle down and go back to sleep. But I'm still thinking about you, and hoping you get a good night's sleep, and being happy that I'm there at all."

"Oh! - that's... interesting." He cleared his throat, carefully. "I - well. The same, as it happens." The knowledge that Hermione lay and watched him sleeping in just the same way that he watched her made him feel all warm and peculiar and more than a little unnerved. "But do you not find that if you are..."

Damn. There were no words in the language properly to explain a thing which, to him, had always come perfectly naturally; a facility which had saved his sanity many times when he was a spy, even though the stress of recent events had made it more difficult to achieve.

Frowning in concentration, he tried to think his way through explaining something which was both as natural and as indescribable as the colour yellow. "If you are - looking at me, and you are not properly awake yourself, do you not find that the moment is like - turning on the point of a dream, like a gyroscope, moving and balanced, like - sliding without effort across a frictionless surface?"

"Sort of." She frowned too, trying to pin down the exact memory of how it felt. "I still think, but... it's like raindrops on glass, if you know what I mean. Sliding across the surface of my mind, without really having any effect, and then sort of fading off again. Does that make sense?"

"It makes perfect sense," he said with relief, and would have felt like kissing her even if he didn't already feel like kissing her. "Remarkable as that seems." At last they were getting somewhere! "Now that - sliding off, that is very much the effect you need to produce, but you need to turn it outwards and make _my_ thoughts slide away, instead of your own. Can you do that?"

"I'll try." She sighed. "I'm rubbish at this, but I will get better. I will. Although it might be easier with someone else."

"Is my teaching so - inadequate, then?" he snapped, suddenly bitter. "I know I failed to teach Potter, but I thought that you at least would be prepared to work with me on this."

"I am!" She reached out to touch his hand, wishing she'd remembered how badly he was likely to take that. "It's not that. It's just... harder, to keep you out of my thoughts than anyone else. Because I don't want to keep you out. It's the closest we can be, at least right now, and... I like having you there. Being so close to you." She smiled tentatively. "Anyone else, I'd want them to stay out. With you, I have to keep reminding myself not to welcome you in."

Snape swallowed hard, trying to suppress the sudden mental image of Hermione welcoming him in, and hoped she hadn't noticed. "It is - pleasant, to be so close, yes. Although I have to wonder if... well, if you manage to break through into _my_ memories, as Potter did on at least one occasion, whether you will still - be so happy to be close to me. You never know what you might find," he added, nearly making a joke of it.

"I think I would." She smiled. "I sort of hope I do, actually. It feels... good, knowing that someone's seen what you think, seen your secrets and your flaws, and still for some odd reason seems to fancy you. I like it, anyway." She rested her chin on her hand. "And I'd like to give you that feeling. So let's have another go, shall we?" She tried to call up that rain-on-the-window feeling... not trying to quiet her thoughts this time, but putting them aside and covering them over with a wall of glass.

The idea of what she might see if she actually did breach his memory - both what he had had to do as a spy, and what had been done to him - was deeply unnerving. To have his shame laid bare and still be deemed acceptable might mend something, but he could not expose her to such scenes - she was so much less hard-boiled than Lovegood - and suppose she couldn't even look at him, after seeing _that_?

"Your flaws, such as they are, are scarcely in the same league... we shall see." He curled his lip, automatically falling into teacher-mode. "I do not think we need to worry about you breaking into my memory _just_ yet." He pointed his wand, frowning in concentration and forming the thought _"Legilimens"_ -

- although there were a thousand more interesting things to do than teach. His half-formed awareness of Hermione skated smoothly sideways and he found himself unexpectedly fascinated by the dazzle of sunlight dancing across the water outside his window and really, he was looking forward to the planned trip outside with almost absurd pleasure, as well as with anticipatory dread: he had not been outside in what Albus persisted in calling "the nice fresh air" since he had ceased to need the ministrations of the unicorn, and then his mind had not been tracking -

- any more than it was now. He wrenched his attention back onto Hermione with a snarl, as irritated as he was impressed, and drove his will at her with blunt force, breaking through into -

- Severus was a good teacher, she had always thought so, even if he had a filthy temper. He would teach Occlumency with the same grumpy thoroughness that he had Potions -

- which Slughorn was not nearly so good at, not at all, he hadn't even noticed how hard she was trying or told her where she was going wrong. All his attention had been on Harry, who was _cheating_ but -

- he had been so small and anxious, when they started. About her size (and she knew she was small), jumpy and disinclined to be trusting. She'd been delighted when he let her look after him and fuss over him, and -

- it wasn't fair, she and Ron had done more to protect and help Harry than anyone, and yet so many of the older ones still thought they could be shut out of things, as if they were babies, as if they hadn't -

- faced the giant chess-set, and she broke out in a cold sweat just thinking about it, as logic she was too frightened to grasp was wielded by Ron, of all people, to keep them from being killed, and then -

- he was kissing Lavender Brown and Hermione felt as if someone had thrown icy water over her, angry and hurt and strangely numb as she turned and fled from the common room to create flights of unreal birds -

- Charms, now, you knew where you stood with that - it was logical in a strange and lopsided way but it _was_ logical -

Severus shook his head like a dog coming out of deep water, feeling slightly dizzy. "Horace doesn't think you are going wrong," he said absently. "His standards are geared towards getting you through NEWTs so he sees an adequate result as - adequate. Mine, however, are geared at keeping you all alive in a war situation in which you might each be the only potion-brewer you have access to."

He rubbed tiredly at his temples, narrowly missing poking himself in the eye with his own wand, and tried to shuffle his scattered thoughts back into some sort of order. "That was - a definite improvement on your earlier poor performance." Hermione beamed at the nearly-a-compliment, and he scowled at her. Grumpy in-bloody-deed. "The visualization of a sheet of glass was more successful than your earlier attempts at clearing your mind, and with practice it may become an effective mental shield.

"However - once I had broken through the shield, your memories formed a continuous chain of logical connections which made it easy to - " His mind abruptly balked at the word "penetrate", coming so soon after Hermione's comment about welcoming him in. "Nervously randy" was not a good frame of mind in which to perform Legilimency. "I was able to follow a long succession of images which led me further and further in. In this case, there was nothing hugely damaging, although if I were truly Tom Riddle's man I might be interested to see how deeply Potter depends on you. But I could as easily have found myself looking at your memories of discussing the prophecy." She hadn't misled him down harmless tracks deliberately, had she? Surely not.

"Harry doesn't rely on me as much as he used to, but it's still a lot." Hermione nodded, frowning a little. "I could see what you were seeing, sort of... I felt the memories leading into each other, but I couldn't stop them. It's like having everything indexed, isn't it? Someone who wanted to could go straight to the most important memories because they're all in order, like books in a library. If I was like Harry and all my books were in a big untidy pile on the floor tangled up with Quidditch equipment, it would be harder to find something specific, right?" She loved Harry, but his mind was horribly disorganized and she was sure Severus had noticed that.

"It's certainly harder to track coherent thought-processes in somebody who doesn't actually have any." He frowned, unconsciously stroking his fingers across his lips and then rubbing gently at the scar which cut across his cheek. "But yes, the - orderly nature of your mind could present a serious danger. However: it may be possible to build a defence out of that very order."

"Really? How?" Hermione was relieved at the idea of not having deliberately to disorganize her thoughts. She hated untidiness, and she wasn't sure how well she'd cope with having it actually inside her head.

"By intentionally setting up a chain of logically-interconnected memories which in fact lead round in a circle, without branching off at any point. Or, possibly, by encouraging your thoughts to lead into a bottleneck which will cause the reader to stall. A series of complex Arithmantic calculations in which the complexity is the point of interest, and no significant information is derived, for example. Or - " He stopped, blushing.

Hermione made an expectant, encouraging little noise and Severus ducked his head, refusing to meet her eyes. "I have to say that if the person who is attempting Legilimency is male, you can generally throw them completely off course by directing your thoughts towards matters of... feminine hygiene. Unless, that is, they are exceptionally perverse, even by the exacting standards of the - of Riddle's little cronies. I would prefer, however, that you not, um, do so on this occasion. I am still..." Disturbed by the sight of blood, he thought, but even thinking it in the privacy of his own private head was enough to make him feel rather pale around the gills.

Hermione felt her face getting hot. "I'd rather not do so on this occasion either," she admitted. "Aside from knowing that... that... bothers you, it's really quite messy and undignified most of the time, and my hair is messy and undignified enough without you knowing about the bodily functions. In, you know, detail."

He looked as uncomfortable as she felt, and she dropped the subject hastily. "I like the general idea, though. I can think about Arithmantic calculations all day, and I have loads of memories that would go straight there. And if I set up several chains that stop with an Arithmancy loop, wouldn't it sort of create the illusion that that's all I think about? I mean, everyone knows I'm a bookworm and a hopeless swot. If I make up chains and loops that all go back to my schoolwork, and maybe toss in some fights with Harry _about_ schoolwork, which I've had lots of... maybe I could make it seem like I'm a sort of bossy academic type who just helps Harry with his schoolwork and coaches him in Charms and things and wouldn't be told anything really important?"

"Or wouldn't be interested in hearing it. Yes, that's possible. If the - if _He_ ever really seriously decided to sift through your mind He would rip you apart and scatter you like a burst pillow; but if you make what's in your mind seem dull and not very relevant he might not bother to put himself to such exertion, and a lesser Legilimens such as Bellatrix could be completely distracted.

"Very well." He steepled his fingers, although the prosthetic arm still felt awkward and numb. But practice was vital, however irritating. "We will try again, and this time, see if you can direct me into a recursive loop. Only - don't put too much weight behind the glass wall. That may sound strange when I've spent all bloody afternoon coaching you on how to project it, but you don't want to give a hostile Legilimens the impression that you're _trying_ to shut them out. It needs to feel natural, like." His ears caught up with his tongue and he cursed under his breath: Adrian's tricks of speech were obviously starting to rub off on him.

Hermione nodded. "All right." She smiled at him. "And... thank you. For explaining it, and for being so patient." And for sounding like Adrian, which was unfairly endearing.

"It's easier to be patient with somebody who wishes to learn, and who isn't radiating hatred at me from every pore. Although - well, with Potter, the way Albus saw it was that if I succeeded in teaching him to exclude me and therefore also the - Him from his mind, that would be a positive result; and if he failed to exclude me, at least I would be able to assess the degree to which - Riddle - was infiltrating him."

He scowled, fiddling with his wand. "As it happens, of course, the one thing the little shit did manage to keep from me was the degree to which he continued to dream that - _Legilimens_!"

Caught unawares, Hermione's mind yielded to him and for an instant he saw a flash of her own memory of the Department of Mysteries, a circular room beginning to turn like a cog-wheel, doors ticking past as blue flames streamed sideways from trees of candle-light, before the smooth glossy surface of her mind caught the point of his attention and began to slide it gently sideways, towards...

- she was five years old, and her father was showing her the inside of an old-fashioned clock. The cogs and gears clicked and whirred along in perfect time, and she felt as if she had discovered some great secret of the universe -

- seeing the Library at Hogwarts had given her the same feeling, and she'd explored for hours, running her hands along the spines of the books, certain that here she would be able to learn everything about everything and blissfully unable to decide where to start -

- and there was always more and more to learn, and the panic of exams was so much worse in her third year, so very much worse, and she'd been sure she would fail -

- Harry and Ron always dismissed her fear of exams, they didn't understand that she cared about doing well... they didn't even care about their own classes, let alone hers, they'd never listened to a word she had to say about -

She'd intended to steer that thought into Arithmancy, but she inhaled just then and _smelled_ him, so close, and it slipped into -

- they had never appreciated him, never, and they would never understand why just being near him made her heart beat faster, or why she was sure she would never feel quite the same about anyone else because nobody else could possibly be as brave and vulnerable and clever and obstinate and diffident and patient and impatient and crotchety and adorable as he was.

He released her mind, and Hermione closed her eyes as she blushed peony-red. "Er... that wasn't where I meant that to go."

The object of her adoration cleared his throat, carefully. "That was - certainly an effective way of distracting me from your memory of the Department of Mysteries, if a little... unorthodox."

He flashed her a whimsical, fleeting smile, which was somehow made more charming, not less, by the thin scars streaking outwards from the corners of his mouth. "Ought I to be concerned that you can smell me from several feet away? It would be - irredeemably adolescent and crass to sniff my own armpits, but - " He made a dismissive, self-deprecatory movement of his head and smiled again, a silly, embarrassed little smirk. "It's a matter of masculine pride, you understand, to know whether I smell suitably like a rose or merely - sweaty and unwashed."

"It's partly the oils that Neville made for you, and the shampoo I got you... and partly just you." Hermione was still blushing a bit. "I doubt anyone else would even have noticed, but I sort of... uhm... concentrate on you. And I've got quite a decent sense of smell, even if it's not as good as yours." She smiled. "And... well, I suppose you could tell that smelling you doesn't prompt any negative thoughts. Quite the opposite."

"And you," he said gravely, "smell like hope, and summer, and coconut shampoo, and a hint of clean laundry. Do you want to try again - Occlumency, I mean - or have you had sufficient mental exercise for the afternoon?"

Hermione laughed. "After all this time, you still haven't learned not to offer me more lessons? I always want to keep going, unless I'm actually falling asleep in my chair." She looked him over thoughtfully - he looked a little tired, but not too bad. It was so hard to tell with him, though. "Unless you're getting tired, of course. Then we could always move ahead to the snuggling up and talking, which I also like quite a lot."

"I have sufficient energy for one more attempt, I think, but I am becoming..." He gestured at his left shoulder with his hand - the real one. "Irritatingly aware of Filius's - ah - _hand_iwork."

"Still," Hermione said brightly, "you've managed it for three hours: that's good, isn't it?"

"It's progress, of a kind, certainly. Look away, please." He was squeamish enough about the prosthesis on his own account, without having her seeing him slide his hand inside his robes, open the buckle and draw off his own suddenly-motionless left arm, which an instant before had been flexing and grasping. With a small shudder of unease, he took up his wand and banished the dead-looking, dismembered thing to the safety of the wardrobe, where he wouldn't have to look at it until tomorrow's exercises. "Once more then, please, and then we can commence - snuggling. _Legilimens!_"

* * *

**Author's note:**

"Them as believes nothing, is seldom disappointed. But they do miss a lot of action!" is a quote from the short story _A Wind from Nowhere_, which appears in the anthology of the same name by Scottish children's author and playwright Nicholas Stuart Gray.

To "give someone enough rope to hang themselves with" is to leave them free to act, in order that they may incriminate themselves.

I assume Snape probably brews his own country wines because nettle wine was one of the items in the bottle-puzzle he set up to guard the Philosopher's Stone. The cupboard which he is using for that purpose is, in fact, the same cupboard in which Hagrid kept baby Aragog.

In the sort of north Derbyshire/south Lancashire area that Snape probably comes from, people tend to call their parents "Mums and Dads" rather than "Mum and Dad"; and "Shot!" (probably contracted from "Good shot!") is a general exclamation meaning "You scored a good hit and I'm impressed" - whether it's a verbal hit or a goal in football or whatever.

This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_, to show that Albus and Severus had not been very close friends prior to Snape's torture, and to comment on Snape's friendship with Lily. Part of the scene between Harry, Snape and Hermione, where Harry asks about the nature of Snape's relationship with his mum, has been substantially re-written.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The game which Snape, Harry and Hermione are playing is called British Blackjack. The rules are as follows:

The dealer deals seven cards to each player, including him/herself, and then places the remainder of the pack face down in the middle of the table, and turns over the first card, placing it to the side of the face-down block. The player on the dealer's left starts.

The object of the game is to get rid of all the cards in your hand. Each successive player has the option of placing one of their cards on top of the uppermost face-up card, if it matches it either by number or by suit. For strategic reasons they may if they wish choose not to play a card which they can play, but if they cannot or do not lay down a card, they must pick one up from the face-down block.

The following cards have special meanings:

If a player plays a two, the player next after them must pick up two cards, unless they put down another two, in which case the player after them picks up four, and so on, to a maximum of four successive twos played, and eight cards picked up by the person at the end of the chain. Once a two has been played, and the next player has picked up two, the two which is face-up in the centre thereafter becomes a normal card and the third person may lay a card down on it by number or suit, without being forced to pick up two.

If a player plays a black Jack, the next player must pick up six cards, unless they have another Jack to play. Playing another black Jack forces the third player in the sequence to pick up twelve cards, unless they have a red Jack. Laying a red Jack on a black Jack neutralizes it, and the next player may play another Jack, if available, or follow suit. If there are only two people playing it is advisable to be wary of playing a black Jack unless you have the other black Jack, or a red Jack, or you know the other black Jack has already been played - otherwise the other player may "double Blackjack" you.

As with twos, if Player One plays a black Jack and Player Two picks up six cards, the black Jack face up at the centre of the table has been neutralized and Player Three may follow it with a Jack or by suit, without having to pick up six.

A seven reverses the direction of play. If the very first card turned over is a seven, the player on the dealer's right starts, rather than the dealer him/herself, unless there are only two people playing, in which case the dealer starts. An eight causes the next player in line to miss a turn: if there are only two people playing and the first card turned over is an eight, the dealer starts play. Again, sevens and eights only affect the player next in line after they have been played. Once somebody has been skipped, or play has been reversed, they become normal cards.

If there are only two people playing, sevens and eights each effectively mean that the other player misses a turn, and one may then play them off in long runs, ending by either playing a normal card, or picking one up, or going out. For example 8H, 7H, 7S, 7C, 8C, 8D, 10D.

Aces may follow any suit and any neutral number, and may then be followed by any suit named by the person playing the ace. That is, you can't use an ace to neutralize an active two or Jack, nor can you lay an Ace on a "special" card such as a two or an eight and then say that it _is_ a two or an eight, and expect the next player to act accordingly. An ace remains an ace. But you can e.g. put the Ace of Diamonds down on top of a Four of Clubs, and then say you want to be in Hearts. You can also lay an ace on a two or a Jack that has already been played out.

Some players deliberately bluff at this point. If you are getting low on cards and you know the other player has an ace, you may play an ace and ask for a suit which you don't actually want, knowing that the other player will probably then use their ace to change the suit away from the one you just named in order to prevent you from (as they think) going out - with a one in three chance that they'll choose the one you really wanted.

When all the face-down cards have been picked up, the top card from the block of face-up cards is taken and placed face up on its own, and the rest of the block re-shuffled and laid face down.

If you get down to having only one card in hand you must say "Last card" at once, before going out (if you can go out) or before the next player has made their move. If you fail to say "Last card" you must pick a card up on the next round, even if you could otherwise have gone out.

Normal scoring is as follows: for each round, if there are only two players the winner gets one point and the loser none. If there are three players, the winner gets two points, the second person out gets one and the third gets none. And so on. The overall winner is usually the first person to ten points if there are two players, to eleven points if there are three, twelve if there are four and so on.

If there are more than two players it is possible for two or more people to finish the game with a winning score - out of four players, two of them may finish the final round with twelve points, for example, even though one must have got there first. In this case it is customary for both (or all) the players with winning scores to proceed to a tie-breaker round.

There is no theoretical limit to the number of people who could play, although if you have more than four or five players it may be advisable to play with two decks, so that one is not constantly having to re-shuffle the pool. This makes it possible to lay eight twos or four black Jacks, which means somebody could be forced to pick up twenty-four cards in one go.


	19. 17 The Name of the Rose

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**17: THE NAME OF THE ROSE**

They'd decided that a Hogsmeade Weekend would be the best time for Snape to venture outside: fewer students about, and the first and second years could simply be kept out of the way. The fact that the Potions master semi-Emeritus would be leaving the confines of his quarters for the first time in over five months was not publicized beyond the immediate circle of his guards and carers, and the school as a whole wondered why it was being granted an extra Hogsmeade visit only six weeks after the Valentine's Day one: but it wasn't about to look a gift-Hippogriff in the mouth.

For the sake of their public honour, as well as his own nerves, he'd suggested an honour-guard of his Slytherins, which had been easy enough to arrange - the difficulty had been convincing them that having a buzzing swarm of people hovering around him would be bad, and whittling the volunteers down to a dozen. Hermione left them guarding the door, and slipped into the room, smiling at Neville. "We're ready when you are."

"Right... you stay with him, then, and I'll go check that the way's clear." He gave Snape - draped in clean robes and with unusually tidy hair which Aurora Sinistra had trimmed for him especially - a fond look and slid out of the door. "Out of the way... you don't have to guard him from ME..."

Hermione laughed at his weary tone, then went over to the bed. "I've been given permission to go about out of uniform outside, just for today," she said cheerfully. "In order, I suspect, to make this seem as informal and friendly as possible, for your sake. I'm quite glad - snogging you while I'm in uniform always feels a bit odd, and I do hope we'll find time for it while we're out."

"Snogging you, as you so fragrantly put it, when you are - out of uniform is definitely preferable." He cast an admiring eye over the robes she had chosen. Not only were they a mixture of deep greens and browns, subtly introducing one of the Slytherin colours without screaming it, but they showed her figure off to much better effect than the baggy black of standard school robes. "Help me into the chair, then."

She beamed, having noticed that appreciative eye. "Happy to... I've arranged that honour guard, by the way. A dozen loyal Slytherins, headed by Draco. There were about thirty volunteers, but I didn't think you'd want that many people crowded around you." She pushed the chair close to the bed, and leaned over to help him into it, deliberately turning her head a bit so he could see the green velvet ribbon holding back her hair. "Draco fancies himself as your champion, I think. I don't mind if he helps, but _I_ am your champion, thank you. We already discussed it."

"I don't think there's any law which says I may have only _one_ champion - although it's to be hoped that only one wears my favour in hopes of my romantic favour - as I wear hers." Under his shirt, loosely looped around his upper arm and charmed not to slide down, he wore a wide, cherry-red satin ribbon, its ends embroidered with protective runes in a darker red. He reached out and touched the green ribbon with his fingertips, feeling a distinct lump in his throat. "You've no cause to be jealous of poor Draco, you possessive chit."

"I do so," she said, touching his arm gently. She'd put as many loving, protective spells on that ribbon as one strip of cloth could hold. "He can declare his loyalty and devotion to you to all the world. I have to be sneaky about mine... for a while yet, anyway." She kissed his cheek, easing him gently into the floating chair.

Snape clutched at the chair-arm rather nervously, feeling it bob and dip under his weight. He had never been good with heights. Not that three feet above the floor was high, exactly, but it felt it, knowing he quite literally didn't have a leg to stand on if the chair should tip over. "You're allowed to declare your... friendship, at least, your support, as much as Draco does. It's only the, um, incipient romance which I would prefer not to air publicly just yet. Not that - I mean, you're easily eighteen months over the age of consent in our world and two and a half years over it for a Muggle, even without the Time-Turner, so it's not as if - as if anyone could really justifiably complain. And I am not, exactly, even your teacher any more. But I'm not sure how Albus and Minerva are going to react, nor do I want to insult them by having them find out through a third party and think we were hiding it from them. Even if we are."

He settled back gingerly against the cushions and smiled at her, happy and sad together. "Besides, this feels all so - private, so - delicate. While we are still working out the details ourselves, I have no desire to see our - relationship, however you want to describe it, being gloated and pontificated over in the pages of the _Daily Prophet_. God knows, they were furious when I turned out to be a Martyred Hero after all, instead of 'treacherous Death Eater scum' - they'd just adore to get some scandal on me. And I would hate to see something so... curiously cleansing and light being paraded to the whole world as something - sordid."

"I know." She leaned down to kiss him gently. "I understand, I do. I just... wish I was ten years older, sometimes. Then it would all be so much easier, for both of us. You're right, it is still rather delicate just now, and we do need to get it all worked out, but... I love you, and I hate having to pretend that I don't. You've been alone for so long, and known to be so, I want everyone to know that you are loved and wanted." She touched his cheek lightly. "And I'm very proud of being with you. I know you don't believe it yet, but I am."

"That's very... Slytherin, to worry about the public face. It would mean a lot to me, to have it widely known that I - that somebody wanted me. That I wasn't just a make-do. Especially - especially to be wanted by somebody so fine. And if you're proud to be wanted by me - God knows why you should be, but if you are... When we - if we decide that this whatever-it-is that we have is viable and durable, we'll have to go public about it with a flourish and a fanfare of trumpets, metaphorically if not literally - won't we?"

"You definitely aren't just a make-do," she agreed, tucking the soft Mackinley tartan blanket that Minerva had given him around his waist, the heavy woollen folds making the near-total lack of legs a little less painfully obvious. "And I am enormously proud of being with you, and wanted by you. I will wear your colours discreetly for now, but when you're ready to make an announcement..." She smiled down at him. "Anyway. Ready to go outside? I'll be right here, and there are twelve people out there who love you almost as much as I do and who have been desperately worried about you."

"Then I must do my best not to worry them any further by throwing a panic fit... I do so enjoy provoking people, but it would be - ungrateful, deliberately to upset someone who actually cares about me. And irresponsible, since it is my duty to care for them." Truth to tell, he felt rather choked. He hoped that his Slytherins would respect him, and expected that they would be at least moderately grateful for his protection and care - but the idea that they might actually love him for it was still very new. "I'm as ready as I'll ever be: lead on, then, and we shall go and muster the troops."

She kissed him again, feeling his hand brush the ribbon in her hair, and then she took up her position to the right side of the chair, steering it with one hand, the other ready to clasp his if she were needed. Guiding the chair to the door, she opened it and nudged the chair gently through.

Draco had made the necessity for quiet and calm very clear, so the frantic babble which was otherwise to be expected had been muted to a concerned murmur as they gathered round to gaze anxiously at him. Besides Draco, only Pansy actually approached the chair, trying to smile and failing badly as tears overflowed. "We're so glad to see you, sir" she managed, gulping a bit. "We d-didn't think we'd ever see you again, for a while."

"Most of you have seen me at least a couple of times since my return to Hogwarts, Miss Parkinson, but if looking at me gives you such unaccountable pleasure..." He gave her a flicker of a smile to soften his trademark sarcasm, and silently offered her the spare clean handkerchief he always kept for soggy, sobbing students. It had never occurred to him, until very recently, that anyone would care enough about him to be cut by his coldness. "It's very generous of all of you to give up the prospect of an extra trip to Honeydukes for my sake."

Draco grinned his spiky grin. "Don't worry, godfa' - I gave Goyle an order for sweets for all of us. He's getting plenty for you two, too. Even for Shortarse."

"That's - very thoughtful of you, Mr..." He balked at the surname, which had come to have such unpleasant associations. "Draco. And reasonably devious, or at least well-planned. Five points to Slytherin for showing proper Slytherin foresight."

Hermione beamed at Draco, who looked very pleased and just a little embarrassed at his godfather's praise: although he was already embarrassed enough on his own account. He and Neville had also been given special permission to be out of school uniform outside in the grounds where somebody might see them. Neville was dressed respectably in lightweight robes made of chocolate-brown linen: whatever else Neville might be short of, he wasn't short of money.

Draco would have preferred to wear his own dress-robes: but anything which he might actually choose for himself would probably look too much like something his father might wear, and be anything but relaxing as far as Snape was concerned; but Professor Slughorn had drawn the line at allowing him to be seen in public in Muggle clothes. Ron had taken great delight in offering to ask his mother to owl Draco his own old hideously maroon velvet dress robes, complete with tatty lace; to everyone's amazement Draco had accepted, on the grounds that they were something he could absolutely guarantee that his father wouldn't be seen dead in.

They didn't look as bad on him as Ron had clearly hoped, even though Ron had (probably intentionally) been a little over-generous when magically-adjusting the size. With Draco's silver-blonde hair and sharp chin, all that velvet and lace made him look like something out of a drippily-romantic eighteenth century Muggle painting. Nevertheless he looked mortified when he noticed his house-mates noticing him, and Snape gave him a small smile of encouragement. "I do appreciate," he murmured, "the... special sacrifices which you are making on this occasion."

Draco shot him an embarrassed grin. "Oh, you know me, godfa' - always at the forefront of fashion."

Pansy, meanwhile, had dried her eyes, and managed to give Snape a damp but genuine smile. "We've seen you in bed a bit, but we haven't seen you like this," she explained. "Up and around, you know, even if it's in the chair."

"And we're glad to see you, sir," Millicent agreed, giving him a shy smile that should have looked ludicrous on someone her size, but somehow didn't. "And that you're going out and getting fresh air and things."

Hermione nodded, resting her hand on the back of the chair to steer it. "Speaking of which... Draco? You know the way we're supposed to take... would you lead us out?" Deferring to Draco's authority got her an approving look from Pansy, and she nodded politely. The Slytherins were important to Severus, and therefore she had to put old rivalries aside.

Snape gripped the chair-arm tightly as they moved off. It was ridiculous, they were on home territory and he was surrounded by his own loyal supporters (try telling the other houses that Slytherins could be loyal!), but doing any new thing was unnerving. Millicent Bulstrode at his left was a reassuringly massive presence - the girl could probably eat a Death Eater for lunch and spit out the bones - but even that cheerful thought made him flinch suddenly at the memory of Greyback eating (block it out, block it out) and he still found it difficult and frightening to go more than a few minutes without touching anyone, especially in such an unaccustomed situation. Without the anchor of contact his head started to swim and he could feel the memories piling up waiting to fall in on him - but he was damned if he was going to panic or ask to be held in public.

As they came out of the Slytherins' dungeon onto the little harbour under the cliff, and started up the steep passage through the rock, Hermione moved her hand along the back of the chair behind him so that he could lean his head against her knuckles. It was nearly enough.

Longbottom was to meet them at the greenhouse, and other than that there was no reason why he should have to speak to anyone outside his immediate escort. As they emerged onto the chilly but sunny lawn in front of the castle and started to bear right towards the greenhouses, he could see a small cluster of Hufflepuffs playing some complicated game with a ball and hoops down the slope to their left. They stopped playing and stared as the strange procession went past, and he could feel himself beginning to sweat, his tongue automatically starting to rub nervously at the scars inside his mouth. To be seen like this...

Hermione saw the Hufflepuffs, and reached down as unobtrusively as she could to clasp Snape's hand with her free one, giving it a gentle squeeze to remind him that she was right there. Pansy noticed, and gave Hermione an odd look - then, when Hermione had tipped her head in the appropriate direction, she saw the other students. She tapped Daphne Greengrass on the shoulder, and the two of them moved up to block the Hufflepuffs' view of the chair.

Hermione smiled gratefully, and Pansy nodded and managed a surprisingly pleasant smile in return. Hermione decided to take that as a hopeful sign. Their shared concern for Snape... and possibly for Draco... seemed to have done away with a lot of their mutual animosity.

Snape rubbed his thumb against Hermione's fingers without letting go of the chair, and watched the sun blazing off the glass sides of the greenhouses as they approached. He felt as if he had left his stomach somewhere a long way behind; sunny days and open playing-fields had unnerved him ever since he was a boy, when being "outside in the nice fresh air" just meant being a more visible target for the Marauders, and he hadn't even been out of his rooms for five months.

But it was - nice, really, to be out in the sun and not be a lone target for attack, to have his own friends (!) gathered round him so protectively - as if he might be worth something to somebody, like normal people. He noticed Pansy Parkinson _noticing_ the moment of physical reassurance between himself and Hermione, and hoped fervently that he could trust to her discretion - the blasted girl had eyes like an eagle when it came to anything remotely sexual.

He wasn't sure what he felt about having Crabbe as part of his escort, considering that he had last seen the boy's father, his face contorted with savage delight, jeering and panting above him as the hot pain tore him and he whimpered hopelessly for mercy. And being surrounded by black robes again hit rather too close to home. But Draco had assured him that Crabbe and Goyle were both so furious with their fathers for their part in the torture of their favourite (!) teacher that they had arranged to take a flat together in Birmingham when they left Hogwarts, and intended never to go home again. And after all they were _his_ black robes, weren't they? - his servants, his champions, not the Dark Lord's.

Neville Longbottom met them by the seventh greenhouse and ushered Snape and Hermione in, smiling a proprietary smile, as the Slytherins took up guard-stations outside, ranged in pairs all around the glass walls. This glass-house was one which was used particularly for tropical exotics and it was kept warm even in the bite of an early Scottish spring. At the centre, among all the heavy, heady greenery, Neville and Professor Sprout had set up a little table and a group of comfortable bamboo chairs, with bright cushions and a brocade table-cloth and a busy little copper kettle, making the whole thing seem more like a Victorian conservatory than a working environment. One of the ferns reached out a frond and tried to snag Snape's robe as he went past, and Neville slapped it.

"Oh, this is nice." Hermione beamed at Neville, who looked bashfully pleased with himself. "Tea and everything!" And right in the middle of all the greenery they weren't all that visible even to the Slytherins right outside. Good.

"Well, it's his first time out of the room in a while," Neville explained, giving his adopted father-substitute a proud look. "We wanted to make it as comfortable as possible. We thought tea in among the flowers and things would be properly restful, like."

"I know _I_ like it," Hermione agreed, steering the chair over to the little table, careful not to settle him in direct sunlight. "Do you?" She examined Severus's face carefully for signs of stress or panic. A little strain, maybe, but not too bad...

"It's very... civilized. Pleasant." He thought that they both understood that he meant, not like being _there_. He moved his head restlessly, feeling strained without quite knowing why. "Help me to move across. I want to do the thing properly and sit in a cane chair, since you've arranged it all so... nicely." He shouldn't feel sad - he didn't, really. Was it just nerves at being out in the open? No, it was movement and change, anticipation - and he thought that for a wonder, what he was anticipating might turn out to be something good, but it made his breath catch in his throat even so.

Neville helped him into the cane chair and shoved the floating one out of the way behind some Ambling Azaleas, and Hermione beamed fondly at the two of them. It was so nice to see them getting along. Then Neville gave her an amused look and she blushed, realizing she probably had a very Molly-Weasley-ish expression on. "Yes, well... who wants tea?" She sat down in the chair beside Severus, reaching over absently to take his hand with her left one, reaching for the kettle with her right.

"Yes, please. Tea would be - agreeable." He noticed Neville noticing Hermione holding his hand with a soppy, beaming expression on his round face, and felt himself going slightly pink. He thought about extricating his hand and hiding it under the blanket, but he was damned if he was going to. Instead, he raised a sardonic eyebrow at the dratted boy and dared him to comment.

Neville grinned. "Tea for me too, please... unless the two of you would prefer to be alone?" He'd never say so, of course, but the blush and the defiant look as Hermione held Snape's hand affectionately were absolutely adorable.

Hermione blushed, too. "Perhaps later," she said, quite unable to meet his eyes and concentrating on filling the teapot. "Milk? Sugar?"

"Two sugars, please - just a little milk."

Snape settled back in the old-fashioned chair and tried to relax against the feeling of inchoate movement. If his life was changing, moving, that was good, wasn't it? He half shut his eyes, feeling the dapple of sun and leaf-shadow flickering across his eyelids, his hand resting loosely together with Hermione's as he listened to Longbottom prattling on about the plants around them. He was going to have to let go of Hermione's hand soon, if he wanted to drink his tea - he was damned if he was going to let them feed it to him as if he was a baby - but right now he was too warm and comfortable to move and it was pleasant to feel a little breeze riffling through his hair. There must be a skylight open somewhere, to allow the air to circulate.

Hermione glanced over and smiled at the unaccustomed peaceful expression on his face. She set his tea in front of him, quite willing to go on holding hands a little longer. At least Neville didn't seem inclined either to object or to tell anyone.

"Oh, and Hermione, you might want to prepare yourself for some awkward questions," Neville said, sneaking it in at the end of a happy lecture on the beneficial properties of certain tropical flowers.

Hermione gave him a startled look, glancing again at Severus. "What do you mean?"

"It's got about somehow... don't ask me how... that your homework standard has dropped so far that you're mostly getting Es," Neville said, his voice serious but his expression less so. "And there's a rumour that you actually handed in a Defence essay that was two inches short. There are concerns that you might have been Imperiused or something."

Hermione blushed. "Oh. That." She had better things to do with her time than homework, these days. Was that so wrong?

Snape woke up with a snap. "Hermione! If you've been neglecting your studies for my sake... I know you said you could walk the exams and I'm sure you could, but it would be a tragedy if the - the best scholar Hogwarts has produced in decades ended up with poorer exam results than she could have done, just for my bloody sake." He smiled tightly. "'Exceeds Expectations' is an odd mark, of course - it could be argued that in your case it must mean 'Even better than Outstanding', since everybody expects you to get straight Os. And in yours, Longbottom, it means 'Well, he hasn't actually killed anybody or blown up the castle yet.' But, seriously Hermione, I must insist that you not neglect your work."

"I'm doing perfectly all right," Hermione said firmly. "I admit, I haven't been doing all the extra work I usually do, but all the teachers know why. I think some of them are even quite glad not to have to mark an extra foot of parchment every time." She gave Neville a reproachful look. "I haven't been neglecting my studies, I promise. Just stinting on my essay time a little."

"I suppose that need not affect your final results... but I shall check up with Minerva, you know, and make sure that she's happy that you are still achieving your full potential. I may not be - I may not be fit to teach but I am still a member of the faculty, Albus has assured me so, and as such your academic progress is still my concern and my obligation." He was aware that he was sounding like a stuffed shirt - but really, it was no worse than the lecture Hermione herself would have given the Brats if they were neglecting their studies for their love-lives. How - bizarre, to think of himself as the focus of a distracting teenage romance!

Hermione smiled at him, giving his hand a gentle squeeze. It was so nice, in an odd way, not to be the one giving that lecture. "I'll put more work into it," she promised. "Although I'm sure Professor Sprout won't thank you for making my essays longer again." Neville snickered at that, and Hermione grinned, reaching out to touch Severus's cheek when Neville glanced away. "I promise, I won't let you interfere with my studies," she said softly. "Unless you're inclined to be helpful and discuss them with me, because I always enjoy that."

"I am always happy to look over your essays on subjects on which I am qualified to comment" he said rather awkwardly, "and I won't feel offended if you want to work rather than talk. Lovegood already uses my head as a book-stand in any case."

"I think I can manage to study without actually putting my books on you," Hermione said, grinning a bit because that did sound so like Luna. "And I'll work while I'm with you if I need to, although I'll try not to. We usually have more interesting things to talk about than producing two feet on the transfiguration of inanimate objects into animate ones... not that that isn't interesting, of course, I've always liked Transfiguration."

"I don't see how anyone could," Neville said, shuddering. "I hated it. It's so... vague. I could never work out where I was going wrong. At least with Potions I could _see_ the mistake, even if it usually wasn't in time."

"The problem with mistakes in Potions though, Longbottom, is that you may end up reviewing your mistakes from the afterlife. At least errors in Transfiguration aren't usually lethal - unless you are Transfiguring yourself, of course. And Transfiguration from inanimate to animate is a fascinating topic, because no-one has yet managed to ascertain for certain whether the creatures so created are true living beings, with feeling and soul, or just a kind of tulpa - mere soulless simulacra."

He realized, with a sense of fragile grace, that he was perfectly content sitting here in the dappled sunlight, drinking tea with two friends (!), and for the first time since the Dark Lord had sent his ruined body back to Hogwarts as an object lesson the horrors of memory had no grip on him. It wasn't even that he had forgotten what had been done to him - but right now, among the sun and the flowers, it didn't seem to be relevant to anything. "Likewise, if you Transfigure a rabbit into a pillow, and then back again, where did the rabbit's self go in the interim?"

"When we were in fourth year," Neville said with a small shudder, "Professor McGonagall had us all turn hedgehogs into pincushions, and Dean Thomas's pincushion still acted if is - as if the pins hurt it."

Snape grimaced. "Sometimes the Transfiguration is definitely only partial, as in this case, and the - the object retains some signs of responsiveness, of consciousness. Sometimes the transformation seems to be complete and the object insensate - but who can tell? Wizards who Transfigure themselves always do retain some degree of consciousness and sensation throughout, but it's not clear if that is true of subjects who are Transfigured by someone else; and no one will admit openly to having performed an animate-to-inanimate Transfiguration on a human subject other than themselves."

He supposed he was lucky that none of his former Death Eater colleagues had had the intellectual curiosity to try it on him. Or had they, and the transformation had been so successful that he wasn't even aware of it? "If your Transfigured rabbit-pillow appears to be totally insensate, does it in fact retain any awareness, and if so is it suffering? If it does not, are you even sure you've got back the same rabbit you started with? These are important philosophical and ethical questions."

"They really are," Hermione agreed, making a face. "Vanishing things is even worse. Especially vanishing them permanently. I didn't mind the snails so much, but I still feel a bit guilty about the kittens, even if Professor McGonagall did promise they'd all been made out of catkins and probably weren't really alive. I enjoy Transfiguration as a subject, but I really prefer to stick to inanimate objects... well, that or minor changes. Or doing them on myself, of course... I've always rather wanted to become an Animagus. Professor McGonagall makes it look so easy, and so much fun."

Neville sipped his tea. "This is why I prefer Herbology. Fewer ethical dilemmas - although mandrakes do worry me a bit - and hardly any explosions. I can live with things trying to eat me occasionally if I'm sure they won't explode."

"I can see the logic of that, I suppose," Snape said, inclining his head towards the boy. "Personally I prefer Potions, because whether or not the potion explodes is within my own control, whereas the things which might try to eat one have - private and unpredictable agendas. But then I have an excellent memory for the properties of the various ingredients, and _very_ fast reactions. I would have been reduced to a smoking crater and a pair of boots long since, if I hadn't."

He sipped his tea thoughtfully. "Self-Transfiguration and the Animagus transformation are really two different things, yus kin. Transfiguration is a - a brute change, forced on matter by magic. To be an Animagus, however... as I understand it, it involves finding that part of yourself which is - which is in tune with the nature of the beast, whatever beast it is, and drawing it to the surface, so that the part of you which is human is pushed down... like a boat heeling over in the water, almost, your soul rolls over, it exposes its other side..."

"Like sculptors," Neville said thoughtfully. Snape looked at him quizzically. "They always say - if you want to sculpt an elephant, you get hold of a block of stone and then you cut away all the bits that don't look like an elephant."

It was a strange, even a ridiculous image, but he was feeling too peaceful to mock it and besides, he could see what the boy meant. "Yes - quite a lot like that. You peel away the layers and parts of yourself that don't look like a - preferably not an elephant, it would never get out of the door. A bear, a dog, a hedgehog - whatever form most expresses that part of yourself which is drawn to the beast. Often, a beast which... which has a magical, symbolic meaning which represents some part of the person's nature."

"I'd very much like to do that," Hermione said wistfully. "It sounds as though it might be rather uncomfortable, though... you might find out things about yourself that you'd rather not know. At least, though, if the animal form is a... a reflection of myself, it's not likely to be a bird." She shuddered. "I'm terrified of heights, and I loathe flying. I can't imagine any part of me opting to do it."

"I'd probably be some sort of food animal," Neville said reflectively. "Which wouldn't be so bad, actually, I imagine it's quite restful being a cow or a guinea-pig or something..."

"I'm not sure," Hermione replied seriously. "Guinea-pigs are quite excitable animals, and the males fight terribly."

"You don't fancy yourself as a great big roaring bull, then?" Snape said lightly. "I could see you as a koala, Longbottom - sleepy and slow-moving, but very strong and with an impressive bite. Or a steady, patient draught-horse... My anti-fan-club in Gryffindor would say I should be a crow or a bat and I'd _like_ to be something more impressive - a raven or an eagle, maybe, even though flying scares the arse off me too. But Minerva tells me I'd probably be a scrawny black and white tomcat with a convex nose, and she'd turn into a tabby and box my ears for me to keep me in line." He drained his tea, sighed and put the cup back on the little table with a definite click. "But knowing my bloody luck, I'd probably turn into a fish out of water, and drown in air. Or I _would_ turn into a tomcat, and Mrs Norris would get the hots for me."

"I can see you as a scruffy cat," Hermione agreed thoughtfully. "Independent and ferocious, but with secret inclinations to curl up with someone nice and purr. Or maybe as a raven... you've got a very raven-ish sense of humour." She grinned at Neville. "And I think you'd make a very good canine, actually... one of those huge, fluffy Old English Sheepdogs that bounces around being comical and friendly right up until it feels called upon to bite someone's nose off."

"I could do nose-biting, I think. But what would you be, Hermione?"

"I'd like to see myself as a badger, perhaps - snappy and a bit myopic, sometimes, but hard-working and loyal."

Snape poured more tea for everybody, frowning thoughtfully; pouring tea was something he could do one-handed from where he was sitting, and it made a pleasant change not to need to be waited on, even in such a small thing. "I see you more as a meerkat, or a raccoon - all bright, slightly anxious eyes and clever paws and inquisitiveness. And Hagrid would be a bear, certainly - or even a goat - something that will eat almost _anything_. Have you ever tried his stoat sandwiches?" He blew across his tea to cool it. "But to get back to the Transfiguration issue - I'm not sure it even matters whether a kitten you make out of a catkin is a real kitten or not; the question, surely, is can what you made feel? Is it a - a someone, even if it's an artificial someone, or is it just a complex illusion of someone?

"It's part of the - the arrogance of the old bloody pure-blood families that hardly anybody ever seems to ask these questions. Albus says it will be their downfall, in the end, and I think he may be right. They don't even consider the - the _power_ that the house-elves have, and yet those little brutes are... And what, for example, gives Molly and Arthur the right to say that their garden is their garden, and the gnomes should all be evicted? The things have a measurable IQ, after all, and they lived there before the wall was built - so what law says it's the Weasleys' garden and not _theirs_? Just because they are small?"

"The gnomes I don't mind so much," Hermione said thoughtfully. "It's... more of a territorial war, with them, and they never get driven off for long. Skirmishing continues, but the majority of the time they more or less put up with each other. Vanishing living beings is... worrying. Or turning them into inanimate objects. Even if they are just simulacrae, how do we know they don't think they're not?"

Neville nodded. "I know what you mean about the pure-blood arrogance," he agreed, stirring sugar into his fresh cup of tea. "That... disregard for consequence. 'I will do this, now, and then I will be completely surprised when it has ramifications later.' You can't do that, with Herbology... plants aren't like Transfiguration or Potions. What you do now isn't just going to have consequences at the end of the lesson, it might have consequences at the end of a year, or ten."

"You know, I never thought of it like that," Hermione agreed, sipping her tea. "Disregard for consequences. Good way of describing it, Neville." Neville went pink with pleasure, and she smiled at him.

"Potions can have ramifications ten years later, believe me - depending on how big the crater was. But yes, you are quite correct, Longbottom. The pure-blood families - most of them are so used to being able to achieve anything they like with a wave of a bloody wand, so used to being able to just undo any mistake they may make, that they don't consider that some things - cannot be undone. Especially... psychological trauma. If a thing can't be mended in a few hours, they can't deal with it, so they pretend it doesn't exist. In Transfiguration - at least living or quasi-living things which get turned into inanimate objects do revert back later, unless one invests a great deal of power in fixing them. But one wonders what they experience during the Transfiguration. Do they cease to exist? Are they unconscious? If conscious are they distressed by the transformation? Do they feel pain? Even people like Minerva and Filius, who wouldn't dream of ill-treating a house-elf, think nothing of getting the students to turn a hedgehog into a pin-cushion and then stick pins in it without ever wondering whether they are doing it lasting harm. Because when you have magic, everything you do can be undone, can't it - except when it suddenly can't."

"It would be interesting... and probably necessary, from the ethical point of view... to actually try it on a person," Hermione said thoughtfully. "It's a dreadfully unnerving prospect, but Professor McGonagall could certainly do it without doing the subject any lasting harm. Physical harm, anyway - the emotional shock would be something else entirely. I'll talk to her, ask her if it's been done before. If it hasn't, I'm sure I could tolerate being a statue or something for a couple of minutes, just to see..."

Snape choked slightly and nearly spat out his tea. "My dear good girl - what did I just say about Transfiguring a rabbit into a pillow and then back again, and not knowing whether one had got the same rabbit back? Please - " he tried to keep his tone light, but the idea made his stomach clench and shiver - "do nothing so recklessly Gryffindor. Minerva could turn the statue back into a woman, I'm sure - but not necessarily into _you_. Even if it looked like you."

"But..." Hermione saw the carefully concealed fear on Severus's face and nodded, reaching out to take his hand again. "I won't," she said quietly. "I'm sorry."

"I don't really like the idea of animal experimentation," Neville said thoughtfully, "but sounds to me like the first thing you want to do is try it on a - a dog that knows tricks, say, and see if it still remembers them after it's been turned back. Then maybe on a human who's very ill and going to die really soon, so that if they get lost in transit - well, so they won't have missed much."

"I suppose that could work," Hermione said equally thoughtfully, still clasping Severus's hand tightly. "Or we could wait until a Death Eater menaces Professor McGonagall and then we'd probably find out. I'm sure she wants to turn them into something nasty."

Snape gave her a rather twisted grin, half wincing and half spitefully amused. "We could capture that bastard Pettigrew and experiment on him - so much more ethical and more deserved than using a _real_ lab. rat." The thought of Pettigrew made him shiver slightly and tighten his grip on Hermione's small, warm hand. "I wonder - if I were to make the Animagus transformation and become, let us say, a tomcat, would I regain my limbs? - or would I still be maimed? If I was wearing Filius's precious prosthetics at the time, would they transform with me - or would I be left as some... monstrous hybrid?"

Hermione considered this. "I know Pettigrew had a missing finger in both forms," she said slowly, "before his hand was replaced with the metal one. But it depends, I think, on whether the transformation involves a straight translation from your original shape to the Animagus form, or whether it's more dependent on your state of mind... he'd bitten off the finger himself, and had accepted its loss, but if you didn't _think_ of yourself as maimed, it might not carry over. I know Professor McGonagall doesn't seem to need glasses as a cat, anyway, and cats _can_ be short-sighted... we could ask her."

"Minerva is I think long-sighted, not short... and I do think of myself as maimed. I've - learned to." He sighed and gave Hermione's hand another squeeze. "Even before I was. What I need is something that is grafted, that is truly a part of me, and we know that this is possible because - because _He_ made a new hand for Pettigrew, much better than all Filius's charmed wood. I wish I knew quite how the thing was done."

"Maybe if we capture him, we can take it off him and find out?" Neville suggested helpfully. "Before we experiment on him?"

Hermione blinked, then looked suddenly thoughtful. "That's an idea, actually... if we could get our hands on it, I'm sure Professor Flitwick could reverse-engineer the original spell..."

"That would be quite poetic, wouldn't it? Considering that it was his bastard idea to whittle me down like this in the first place." He bared his teeth in a grimace and then relaxed again, a considering look on his narrow face. "It might be a solution for Albus too. Poppy and I have managed to keep that arm of his functioning but I haven't found any way of reversing the damage; and I know it still pains him, for all of Poppy's potions and spells."

Hermione nodded. "Madam Pomfrey's told me about it... I've helped with some of the easier brewing. It's nice, to be able to help, even in a small way."

Neville nodded in his turn. "Professor Sprout and I have been starting extra batches of seedlings for a lot of the healing herbs, we're going through them so fast." He rose to his feet. "In fact," he said, with a small and secret smile, "if you don't mind, I want to go and see how the Cameroon Blood-Wort is coming along. I'll, uh, leave you two to it, if I may."

Hermione went a bit pink and smiled. "That sounds like a good idea," she said demurely. "Shall we let you know when we're ready to go?"

"Oh yes - please do. I'll be... over there" he said vaguely, and wandered off, still smiling his secret smile.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Well," Hermione said brightly, feeling suddenly awkward, 'this is... nice." Snape looked at her, his lips quirked and his dark eyes glitteringly amused, and she saw that the mottled scar across his right temple blended in with the dancing leaf-shadows until it disappeared completely.

"How... nice of you to say so."

She blushed harder. "You are a wretched tease," she said reproachfully. "You did, as I recall, specify having my arms around you while you relaxed in the sunlight among the flowers, but if you've changed your mind..."

"That sounds like an admirably good idea on my part," he said gravely, "but unless we're going to sit on the floor you'll have to do some Transfiguration-work on the chairs. I'd offer to do it myself, but working one-handed on a chair I'm actually sitting on would probably just tip me out on my arse."

"Probably." She stood up, moving her chair over beside his, and tapping both with her wand. The two obediently merged into a large, well-cushioned basketlike arrangement quite large enough for two. She sat down beside him on his left, snuggling up against him and sliding an arm around him. "There. Much better."

"Much," he agreed, leaning sideways into her embrace and stretching his arm comfortably along the back of the little sofa. He sighed and let his head fall back onto Hermione's shoulder, so that he was gazing up at the sky above the glass. Far above, circling lazily, he could just make out the outline of a Thestral, doing guard-duty. "I don't think I've ever had a real holiday, or - or leisure like this in my life. When I am... if Filius's prosthetics turn out all right, I'll take you down to the beach at Sandgreen some time, and we'll have a picnic. Except there's no sand there - the whole beach is made up of finely-divided white shell."

Hermione smiled, resting her cheek against the top of his head. "I'd like that, very much," she said softly. "I can't remember the last time I went on a proper picnic. And I'll take _you_ to this little village in Wales where mum and dad and I went for a holiday once, when I was little. I remember thinking it was the prettiest place in the whole world, and there was a lovely bed and breakfast we stayed at. I'm sure it's still there... it was old even when I went."

"That feels so... strange. Like stepping into someone else's life, you know? Can the, the Greasy Git really have something so... simple and pleasant? I'd feel as if I was there under false pretences."

"I think it's high time you did have something simple and pleasant," she said, kissing his forehead lightly. "And I intend to provide it as often as possible. We'll do a proper couple's holiday... breakfasts in bed, kissing behind convenient trees, taking lots of pictures that don't come out very well but we don't care, all the nice normal traditional things." She smiled. "Although I won't make you buy a little plaster cottage for a souvenir, if you don't want to."

"Definitely no plaster cottages." He shut his eyes against the dazzling light of the sun, and contemplated the warm red inside his own eyelids. "It's not really practicable at the moment, I suppose - I'm too much of a target, and taking Thestrals to Wales... But it's something to look forward to, isn't it, for when I am - better." He realized, with a sense of sudden lightness, that he did expect to get better. Not fully - there was no use pretending, even to himself, that he could ever fully cast off what had happened to him - but he did expect to be able to function as an independent person again, some day. The thought made him quite enjoy his current weakness and disability: instead of resenting it as an imposition and a prison he should, as Albus was always telling him, view it as an unimpeachable excuse for an extended holiday.

"It is." She felt him relax against her, much more than he usually did, and she snuggled closer. He actually sounded almost... hopeful. This had definitely been a very good idea. "When we've settled with Him, you and I are going to take a nice long rest... unless it happens before I take my NEWTs, in which case it'll have to wait until after those. But we will, somewhere very quiet where we can get some serious reading done."

"I'd like it to be... somewhere with a river, if possible. I don't know if you've ever... There was this, this Muggle author called Dorothy L Sayers, in the 1920s, she wrote - detective stories, really, except that some of them... Well, some of them were romances, really, with the detective element just as a sub-plot. But not - not sloppy romances, you understand. A real story about two very difficult, prickly, clever people. There was this one book, _Gaudy Night_, in which the couple - Peter and Harriet - are just... drowsing in a boat in the sunlight. It always seemed to me to epitomise some kind of, of unobtainable ideal. Just - being with someone you wanted and who wanted you, drowsing in a boat."

He opened his eyes, wincing against the stab of light, and turned to smile at her. "When it is a little warmer, and if Filius's prosthetics work out, we could of course go for a sail on the loch. But that whole mountain tarn thing doesn't quite fit with the scene I see in my mind. I want a quiet river, and trees hanging low over their own reflections, and no inquisitive things with tentacles."

"I've never read any Dorothy L. Sayers, but... that sounds nice. Very nice." She smoothed his hair, tangling her fingers in it just a bit. "I'm sure we can find a river. And a boat to drowse in." She smiled shyly. "I've had a few similar daydreams, except in mine we're on land. But we talk, and then you doze off with your head in my lap, and it's just... warm and quiet."

"In the story - in the story Peter is sleeping and Harriet is looking at him, this - prickly, difficult, hook-nosed - and she feels this enormous... tenderness, I suppose. She sees him as vulnerable, and it makes her feel _protective_ not - not scornful. And it seemed - unimaginable," he said huskily, his voice low and almost inaudible, "that anyone would ever look at _me_ like that. But you do, don't you? You really do want me, not just..."

"I really do," she whispered. "I want you, heart and soul and prickly, brilliant mind. And I know that feeling. I've felt it a hundred times, holding you, watching you sleeping, trying to keep the nightmares at bay for one more night. That's... in my daydreams you sleep in my arms, or with your head on my lap, and you don't have nightmares because you know that I'm there, that I'll love you and protect you no matter what. I know I can't keep them away for you now, but maybe one day I will be able to. And I keep trying; I will _always_ keep trying."

"God, that would be nice, wouldn't it? To wake up feeling refreshed, instead of wrung-out and ill-tempered. But I don't know if you... I've always had nightmares, for as long as I can remember, not just..." He settled down into the padded scoop of the sofa, so that he really was lying with his head in her lap, and smiled up at her - squinting slightly because of the sun-dazzle on the glass behind her head. The bright light cast her face into shadow and turned her brown hair into a crackle of flame. "Whether you can stop the nightmares or not, it's just - so much better, to wake up to, to kindness and calm words, instead of just - sweating through it on my own in the dark. It's almost _worth_ having the nightmares, just to have your kindness afterwards - and if I'm still afraid to sleep, sometimes, at least I know I don't have to be afraid to wake."

She lifted a hand to shade his eyes, smiling down at him. "You'd have me with you afterwards, nightmares or not," she promised. "And I'm still going to keep trying to convince even the depths of your subconscious that I love you, and I will protect you, and that while I'm watching you it's safe to just sleep." She leaned down to kiss his forehead lightly. "And I like this even more than I thought I would. You may sleep this way as often as you like."

"You'd find your leg would go to sleep, eventually; but for as long as your circulation lasts... But it's not really a matter of feeling safe or not-safe. At least - it is _now_, when I keep dreaming that I am - back there, but in general... Sometimes it's about feeling personally threatened, but often it's just - horrible images. Some of them real things I have actually witnessed, some just - a canker of the imagination. But perhaps - perhaps having some nice things to dream about will push them back, a bit." He grinned at her suddenly. "Now, see, the _dis_advantage of this position is that it makes it very hard to kiss you."

She laughed, and leaned down again to kiss him lingeringly. It was a little awkward, but not too bad. "Mmm... a good point. But I like it anyway." She rested her free hand on his chest, smiling down at him. "Even if my leg does go to sleep. I love just... being with you, like this, quiet and content. I hope we get to do it more often."

"It's very... pleasant," he said drowsily. "I haven't had any leisure time for - well, not since I started teaching, really. And being busy, it stopped me from thinking too much about - about things. Now... now I have a head full of fresh horrors to run away from, but somehow, lying here with you, they just don't seem... all that important. You are - far more interesting."

"Good. I'm glad you think so." Hermione indulged in some happily melty feelings as she kissed him and smoothed back his hair. "I love you, you know." She tipped her head back, closing her eyes for a moment to enjoy the warmth of the sun on her face. This was perfect. He was still unwell, still maimed, she was still too young and worried about letting him down, but this moment... this was perfect.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"They appear to have done us proud," Snape said, leaning companionably shoulder to shoulder with Hermione as he examined the vast pile of sandwiches and cakes and little nibbly things which the house-elves had provided. He was pleased to hear that they had fed his Slytherins equally well: he wouldn't want them to go hungry for his sake. "Look - crab with egg mayonnaise." Crabbe in particular had hollow legs and need to be fed like stoking a boiler. "And look - what _are_ those things - the things that look as though they're filled with pus?"

"_Vol au vents_" Neville replied, helping himself to one. "I know what you mean - but they taste OK."

Hermione reached for a tiny cucumber and salmon sandwich. "They really do look revolting. It's like an adult version of a birthday tea, though, isn't it? Lots of nibbles, so you don't have to choose just one thing." She poured more tea, making a face. "And at least this isn't pumpkin juice. I suppose it must be different if you grow up drinking it, but I, personally, would like to find the originator of that custom and strangle them. Why can't we have fruit juice like normal people? We do get orange juice, sometimes - but what happened to pineapple, apple, grapefruit? - it's orange, pumpkin or lump it."

Snape relaxed against her as unselfconsciously as a dog. Dozing on her lap in the sun had been the first truly refreshing, untroubled sleep he had had since - since forever, really, and he felt luxuriously unstrung. "It's creeping Americanization, that's what it is - this whole 'Pumpkins are for witches' Hallowe'en business. When I was student, we still used proper traditional British turnip lanterns at Hallowe'en - in fact, I think I shall nag Albus about it and see if we can't get them back for this year. Mind you," he added, sipping his tea, "turnip juice would be even worse than pumpkin juice. But at least turnip pasties would be good. Or neeps, I should say, since we're in Scotland."

"Ugh. I've always hated turnips." Hermione smiled, leaning a little against him as she sipped her tea. "I think I'll start Transfiguring my juice, and I don't care if not everyone can do it. I want apple or grapefruit, not pumpkin. Or cranberry. Maybe I could get up a petition. I can't be the only Muggle-born who's developed a passionate hatred of pumpkins."

"Your Transfigured apple juice will of course be pumpkin again once you actually digest it - but I suppose it doesn't matter once it's past your taste-buds." He sampled one of the _vol au vents_, very cautiously. "Hum. Well, they don't taste as bad as they look. I'll give them that. The thing about turnips, though - they need to be done properly, which means mashed up with butter and pepper. I agree, the watery little lumps they serve you in Muggle schools are horrible."

"Did you go to a Muggle school then, Professor?" Neville asked with interest.

"Yes, I'm, ah - three-parts Muggle" Snape muttered awkwardly.

"You don't have to sound _embarrassed_ about it - I think it's dead interesting."

"Thanks. One is never quite sure how the - the pure-blooded students will take it."

"There's nothing that great about being a pure-blood. I mean, it's nice, to know who all your ancestors were and that, but it's possible to overdo it. I mean, look at my family - as inbred as fancy spaniels, the lot of them. I'm the only one who isn't barking - and I'm practically a Squib."

"I wouldn't go as far as that, Longbottom, you're just a bit - unfocussed. And I do understand why, now, although I'm not sure what can be done about it. You're alert enough when it comes to vegetation."

"Mmm. Did you notice the gorse coming out in the undergrowth?"

"Oh yes!" Hermione said with enthusiasm. As they came down to the glass-houses she had seen the splashes of clarion yellow in the underbrush along the edge of the cliff. "It was lovely!"

"And you know what they say, don't you?" Neville replied with a grin. "When the gorse is out of flower, kissing's out of season."

Snape eyed him warily. "Explain, please. It's obvious you mean to anyway."

"Well - there's so many species of gorse, and they all flower at different times - so, basically, the gorse is only out of flower for about two weeks a year. Just long enough to give your lips a rest, really."

Snape and Hermione both went bright pink.

"Yes. Well." Hermione reached hastily for a _vol au vent_. "I always liked gorse. It's so tough and cheerful. And NO comparisons to my hair," she added sternly. "I already know about the resemblance."

"I like your hair," Neville protested. "It's so fluffy."

"That's an understatement," Hermione said ruefully. "Still, tying it up seems to help. I think I'll keep doing it, it's much more convenient this way." She turned her head so Neville could see. "I think the green ribbon looks quite nice, don't you?"

"It looks lovely on you, Hermione, and very... green. Don't you think so, Professor Snape?"

Snape coughed and went even pinker. "Hermione was kind enough to - to wear something indicative of inter-house solidarity."

"Uh-huh? Where's the red one, then?"

"Round my arm," Snape muttered, not meeting the blasted boy's eyes. "Leave it out, Longbottom." The brat was getting almost as bad as Dumbledore. "I don't tease you about _your_ love-life."

"Only because I haven't told you about it yet" Neville replied composedly, snaffling a Scotch egg.

"Well, I think you should, if you're going to keep teasing us about ours," Hermione countered, blushing a bit herself. "And I happen to like green. It's my favourite colour, after pink. I just don't wear it often because the whole house-loyalty thing makes even wearing a hair-ribbon of the wrong colour a big political issue."

"Daft, isn't it? Look at me - I'd have been just as suited in Hufflepuff, really. I don't see why I should only be allowed to date Gryffindors, either - and that's all I'm telling you."

"Oh all right, fine. But I'll find out," Hermione promised, grinning. "Sooner or later. And I nearly got put into Ravenclaw, myself." She patted her hair. "But now I'm going to do my bit to defuse inter-house tension by wearing a bit of green. And nobody but you two really needs to know that I have more than one reason for it."

"I expect Lovegood has already worked it out," Snape said sourly. "She's horribly observant - it must be the tabloid journalist in her. And we're entirely dependent on Albus's sense of fair-play - and you know how far _that_ takes us - not to wander around being invisible all over the bloody place."

"He wouldn't risk it. He knows how much being sneaked up on bothers you now, even more than it did before." Hermione patted his hand gently. "Madam Pomfrey was very firm on the subject of people being invisible around you. Although you're probably right about Luna... and Pansy saw me holding your hand on the way down here."

"You noticed that, did you? Blasted girl. At least she's unlikely to talk to anybody outside Slytherin - that is one advantage to inter-house rivalry - but it does mean I'd better have a word with Draco sooner rather than later."

"Why does it matter who knows, really?"

"You ought to know - you're the one who's keeping your love-life secret here, Longbottom."

"_Touché_, I guess."

"I still can't... I don't like being - looked at. Like this. And if we went public - the whole bloody world would be looking at me, it would be on the front page of the _Daily Prophet_ before you could say 'knife' and I don't - we don't even really know where we're going ourselves, yet, and it would be so much harder to, to know what to do if I felt the whole bloody world staring in at me.

"If we decide... if we decide that this is - permanent, then I will announce it in my own time, _properly_. But I won't have people finding out as if it was something I was ashamed of - and I still hardly can believe that Hermione is even serious about me, though she assures me she is."

"And one day I'll convince you," Hermione said softly, reaching out to touch his sleeve where, underneath, the red ribbon was tied around his arm. "I'm going to keep trying until I do." Neville was beaming fondly at them again, and she went a bit pink. "Honestly, I don't know why you think it's so unreasonable. We've discussed the importance of being able to use words like 'bibliophile' in conversation."

"I'd believe her," Neville advised. "I've seen that look on her face before. It's not worth even trying to argue with her when she gets that look."

"Of course, you've had almost seven years of being bossed about by Hermione, whereas I only started recently. But if I believe her I can only think that there is no accounting for tastes."

"Now you're just fishing for compliments - you only say things like that so she'll tell you how wonderful she thinks you are."

"And what if I am?" Snape replied calmly, helping himself to another crab-and-egg sandwich. "In my position, I'll take all the compliments I can get. I wonder if the house-elves would bring us a beer, if I asked? You're both of age, so I can't be accused of corrupting your innocence." Too _much_ beer, of course, might raise the embarrassing issue of having to be helped to reach a lavatory - but there was one at the back of Greenhouse Four, to save Pomona Sprout from having to trek all the way back to the castle when she was working out here.

"They'd probably bring one, unless Madam Pomfrey has told them not to." Hermione shuddered. "And I don't know about Neville, but even if you wanted to corrupt me with it, I would refuse. That stuff tastes horrible. Wine is one thing, I've had that now and then, but beer... ugh."

"Beer is an acquired taste - one which one usually acquires in one's late teens or early twenties, if one is going to. It may be something to do with one's taste-buds maturing... and in any case, one beer is very different from another, both in taste and in consistency. Far more so than with wines."

"Dunno," Neville said cheerfully. "I've liked it since I was nine - d'you think they've got Old Peculiar? Since you're offering."

"I've only ever tried it a couple of times, and I thought it tasted dreadful both times," Hermione said firmly. "I'd much prefer a nice white wine, if I was going to be drinking. But you two may indulge, if you like." She leaned over to pick up the small bell that had been left on the table "in case miss or sirs want anything else", and rang it.

Dobby appeared almost immediately, beaming all over his wrinkled little face. "Is more food wanted, miss? Dobby will be happy to bring anything that is required, at once!"

Hermione smiled. Dobby was weird, but very endearing. "Would there be any beer on the school grounds, Dobby?" she asked politely. "Neville would like something called 'Old Peculiar', whatever that is, and Professor Snape would like..." She gave him an inquiring look.

"Black Sheep, for preference, Dobby, or something similar - but almost anything that isn't lager will do. Any beer, that is. And Hermione - will you drink wine, then?"

She was about to refuse, when it occurred to her that there was a level of symbolism to sharing a drink, and instead she nodded. "White wine, if possible."

"Dobby will bring them at once," Dobby chirped happily. "We is having all those things, just in case they is ever wanted!" He disappeared with the usual cracking sound.

"I've always wondered," Hermione said thoughtfully, "how it is that house-elves can Apparate on Hogwarts grounds but humans can't. It doesn't say anywhere in _Hogwarts: A History_. House-elves aren't mentioned in it at all, actually."

"The author probably left them out because they weren't considered important, any more than the kettles and the laundry. But really, they are... a different order of being. So far as I know the _only_ restraint which works against them is the one which binds them to service: without that, they might do as they please and we could do nothing to stop them. As far as I understand it they are somewhere halfway between a corporeal, flesh and blood being and an _animus loci_ - the occult personification of a place. In this case, usually a house. As late as the thirteen hundreds some wizards worshipped them as minor gods."

"There are lots of Muggle stories about them... they're called brownies or household gods or any number of things, but now that I know about house-elves, I'm quite sure that at least some of the stories are about them." Hermione nibbled on a dainty triangle of sandwich. "They're such _illogical_ creatures. I still don't understand why they cling so fervently to that binding, why they seem to like being made to work themselves to a thread for people..."

"Oh, I agree," Neville said solemnly. "I mean, I can't imagine anyone giving up all their waking and sleeping hours to care for some crabby sod who needs waiting on twenty-four hours a day." Hermione glared at him, and he grinned unrepentantly. "I really can't. Honest. Why would anyone do something like that?"

Hermione blushed and tried to pretend she hadn't. "But some of the wizards are so... so unpleasant to them. So ungrateful."

"Give it up, Granger," Snape said with a smirk: "you're only digging yourself in deeper. But the house-elves - they are to some extent expressions of the house they serve, it's in their _nature_ to serve. It's innate - 'hard-wired', Adrian would call it."

Neville nodded, reaching for a cocktail sausage. "Their contract of service is like a, a sort of marriage or adoption between a house-elf family and a wizarding one. If their 'partner' turns out abusive, like the Malfoys, then you're right, it should be possible for them to - well, to divorce their wizarding family. But if the two families are getting along OK, they don't want to be tricked into accepting clothes, any more than a happily-married husband or wife wants to be tricked into a divorce."

"Oh." Hermione looked down, fiddling with the edge of her sandwich. "I - didn't think of it like that."

"You weren't to know," Snape said, pulling a face. "The house-elf contract is one of many aspects of wizarding society which is not examined at Hogwarts, or explained to the Muggle-born - you're just expected to find out on the hoof, as it were. But many house-elves would be reluctant to seek a - a divorce, as Longbottom put it, even if their wizarding family do ill-treat them, because as with a human divorce, there's always a sense of failure in admitting that the relationship hasn't worked. Dobby is unusual in being detached enough to see that the problem lay entirely with the Malfoys, and not with him."

He flinched as Dobby himself re-appeared with a whiplash _crack_ - there was always that small chance that what was coming through that warp in the world would be a Death Eater, not a house-elf, and his nerves had been raw even before his nightmare captivity. Regaining his composure he murmured "Thank you, Dobby. That will do admirably." Evidently the cellars didn't have Black Sheep ale, but Dobby had used his initiative and brought a very similar beer called Old Speckled Hen.

"Dobby is pleased to be of service, Master Severus. Must go now - Harry Potter is wanting Dobby for something."

"You see," Snape said thoughtfully, sipping his beer, "even Dobby was only able to free himself from his inbuilt servitude to Malfoy Manor by developing an almost equally slavish attachment to Potter. What you failed to understand, Hermione, with all that S.P.E.W. business, is that even the rebels and the free-thinkers like Dobby don't want to not be servants - they just want appreciation for their work, and to be able to change masters if they don't get it.

"Not," he added, putting the beer down and making a wide dismissive gesture, "that I am in any position to talk. I dedicated myself body and soul to the Order for seventeen years, and for all the thanks I got I might as well have been a house-elf, until I was... worn down to _this_." He gestured again, indicating the emptiness where his left arm should be.

"I always thought that was pretty bad of the Headmaster," Neville said seriously. "Sending you into danger like that all the time, and you a friend of his."

"But it was my fight at least as much as his, Longbottom, and I was willing to be risked. At least, he - he exerted pressure on me to become a spy in the first instance, but I had every reason to comply, both the personal, to - to protect a friend and to expiate my own guilt, and the political, because I had realized already that Riddle's dream of a resurgent wizardry was more of a bloody nightmare. And latterly - after Riddle's return he did give me a choice, whether to resume spying or not, and should he have refused to accept my compliance? What would you think of a - an army officer, who sent other people's sons and other people's friends into danger, but kept his own friends safe? Quite apart from the fact that neither running nor hiding would have done me much bloody good."

He picked up the beer again and stared into its murky depths. "No, I have no quarrel with Albus for using any weapon he could against - Riddle, and I don't blame him in any way for what has happened to me. I knew the risks, and I accepted them; to complain now would be like a - a soldier moaning because pitched battle turned out to be more dangerous than a walk in the park. I took the King's Shilling - in a manner of speaking - and I knew what I was doing.

"But it would have been - nice, you know, to get even a little appreciation from someone other than Albus before I was carved into bloody pieces - instead of them all looking down their bloody superior oh-so-clean noses at me." He sighed and turned to Hermione, raising his glass and smiling at her sun-dazzled eyes. "To your very good health."

"And to your own daily increasing health." She lifted her glass to him and sipped her wine, returning his smile. "I never looked down my nose at you," she pointed out. "And I wouldn't have even if I were tall enough."

"Neither did I," Neville agreed, tipping his own glass to Snape. "I was too bloody terrified of you. It would have been like trying to look down my nose at an avalanche or a tidal wave or some other unstoppable natural force thing that could crush me without effort." He grinned at Hermione. "And you were always trying to impress him."

She grinned sheepishly. "I really was. And he just wouldn't BE impressed, it was so frustrating."

"Occasionally I was - but I was damned if I was going to show it. Childish of me, I know, but I don't really have any choice about looking down my nose at people - it's the only way I can see past it." And let them wonder whether he was serious or not! "And just because I could crush you without effort, Longbottom, doesn't mean I _would_. Hermione assures me that I have a delicate touch where it counts," he said, delicately, "and in any case it would be like trying to squash custard."

Hermione blushed, and Neville snickered. "I'm not going to comment on your delicate touch... but I'm going to take the custard thing as a compliment. Soft and bland I may be, but I like the thought of being unsquashable."

"And you sneer so well, it would be a shame to waste it," Hermione conceded, giving her beloved's nose a fond look. In her decidedly biased view, it was perfect exactly as it was. "You smile quite nicely too, though, on the rare occasions when you do it. I like it, anyway."

"I've never had much to smile about, if you think about it. But this is..." He made a wide inclusive gesture, nearly slopping his beer. "For the first time... for the first time I feel as if Adrian is right and I really am going to be - all right. If not quite yet, then eventually. And I have never - except sometimes at school I never had anything like - " He stopped, cleared his throat. "Just - sitting with friends" he went on in a rush, "talking. Having friends _to_ sit and talk with." He took a sip of beer to cover his embarrassment, although he found that his hand was shaking slightly. "Albus doesn't really count. He's fond of me - I do believe that, now, or at least that he's fond of me _now_ - but it's hard just to have a natural conversation with him, because he's such a bloody game-player."

"I know what you mean. Uh... Neville, would you look over there for a moment?" Neville looked away as requested, and Hermione leaned over to kiss Severus's scarred cheek gently. "And I intend to do a lot more sitting with you," she said softly. "And picnicking, and reading, and drifting around in boats."

Neville nodded, looking back when it seemed safe. "And you have me for a friend, too... I may be custard, but I certainly don't play games. I'm dreadful at it, even if I wanted to try."

"It's one of your good points, Longbottom - that you say what you mean, and mean what you say. But I could teach you to play canasta, if you like! And I did mean it as a compliment, really. There's a quote from _Les Miserables_: 'Triumph of that which yields over that which thunders... glory to the mattress which nullifies a cannon.' If you keep on smiling agreeably and side-stepping the question it makes you almost impossible to pin down: Lovegood is a pastmaster at it. Or do I mean pastmistress?" He smiled crookedly. "I've never been very good at it myself - I've got too short a fuse, and I always start getting snappy."

"I can't do it either," Hermione admitted. "I always wind up shouting at people for being stupid... Harry and Ron, usually."

"Dithering can be very useful, too. But yes, I see what you mean about being friendly and ducking the question. I can do that, except when I get nervous." Neville smiled. "And I'd like to learn canasta. Is it difficult?"

"Immensely - if I taught you an easy game you might beat me, and I think we both know how competitive I am."

"Ahh, that explains why you're teaching me instead of Hermione." Neville grinned. "I don't know if you've noticed, but she's one of the most competitive girls in our year. She can't touch Harry or Malfoy for sheer competitive fervour, but she's still pretty determined." Hermione flicked a grape at him and he ducked, grinning.

"Why yes - part of her interest in, ah, 'landing' me is, apparently, so that she can swank about it in front of every other heterosexual female student in the school. She tells me I'm considered a prize catch."

Hermione blushed furiously. "Well, you are. You're so absolutely impossible to get... or you always seemed that way, anyway."

Neville gave her a startled look. "What, really? He is? I thought everyone was terrified of him."

"Oh, most of them are. But there's a certain appeal to the idea of... uh... taming the tiger, you know?"

"Oh. I see." Neville grinned. "Can I be there when you start swanking? I want to watch."

"I assure you, you'll be one of the first to know," Snape said dryly, smiling and gazing into the depths of his beer.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"And this one," Neville said, touching the deep-red bud of the rose which wound itself around one of the wooden pillars which braced the roof, "this is Souvenir du Docteur Jamain. She shouldn't really flower this early, but Professor Sprout has been bringing her on - and the scent! You can smell it already, even though she's hardly opened yet."

Snape took a deep breath of the heavy, heady scent and nodded to himself, closing his eyes. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he began to sing:

"Go down, you blood-red roses, go down;  
For all your pinks and posies  
Go down, you blood-red roses, go down."

The song should have been as pretty and floral as the words but somehow it had a sinister purr to it, as his roughened voice curled itself around the notes.

"Severus!" Hermione exclaimed. "You didn't tell me you could sing!"

He looked down, grimacing. "I used to be able to sing, but now my voice is..."

"It still sounds good," Neville said firmly. "The rasp just gives it added timber, like."

Snape snorted. "I think you mean 'timbre', Longbottom - if there's one thing I've never been accused of, it's having a wooden voice."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"So, you and Professor Snape, you... get on well?"

"... fine. Why do you ask?"

"Only I couldn't help noticing that the two of you seemed to be getting on... very well."

Hermione tried not to blush, she really did, but her face went pink anyway. "I don't know what you mean," she said loftily. "Of course we do get along, I wouldn't still be nursing him if we didn't, but..."

Pansy gave her a knowing look. "And holding hands with attractive older men, that's just part of your nursing technique, am I right?"

"It was the first time he'd gone outside since he came back," Hermione said defensively. "I was being reassuring!" Her blush intensified. Pansy was entirely too good at that I-can-see-right-through-you expression.

"Ri-i-ight," Pansy drawled, and grinned.

"Oh, all right, it's not just..." Hermione sighed. "Come on." She towed Pansy into the nearest available privacy, which happened to be a broom cupboard. "Please don't spread this around, it's not... something that's supposed to be general knowledge yet. It's... not exactly... well, we're still working out exactly... uhm... stop looking at me like that and say something."

Pansy's pug-like face contorted briefly into a scowl. "If I thought for one second that you were taking advantage of him - but you're not, are you? He looked quite pleased to have you there - I suppose there's no accounting for tastes."

"He was... pleased, yes. He couldn't imagine why I would care for him, but he seems to be glad that I do." Hermione fiddled with the edge of her sleeve. "And I do. I care a great deal, actually."

"A Gryffindor caring about a Slytherin? That'll be a first, then."

"Oh, it would not," Hermione said rather tartly. "Honestly, the way people carry on about the whole House thing, you'd think we'd all sworn oaths in blood to always hate our opposing house or something. Yes, I care about him. I'm quite mad about him, in fact. And whether he's a Slytherin or not is completely irrelevant. I like him because he's clever and brave and subtle, not because of a fundamentally unimportant school House designation. I know you and I have had our differences," she added, still rather crossly, "but that had nothing to do with you being a Slytherin. I disliked you on a purely personal basis." Because Pansy had been a rude, snotty little cow, to be specific, but she was really trying hard not to start fights with the people Severus cared about, so she didn't actually say so.

"The same, actually - I'd probably have disliked you just as much if you'd been in Slytherin. But Professor Snape appears to like you, why ever he does, and what the Professor wants - matters." She pulled a wry, pained face. "_He_ matters. For a lot - for a lot of Slytherins he's been the only important adult in our lives we didn't have to be scared of, and if a scrawny, toffee-nosed little Gryffindor is what he wants, that's what he'll have. After - after what happened last year... whatever he wants, we'll back him. All the way."

"I am NOT scrawny," Hermione retorted. "Not anymore. I know I used to be. And he says I'd have made quite a good Slytherin." She counted to ten silently and then sighed. "And he does matter. He matters terribly, to me at least. That's partly why I rescued Draco, because I knew Severus wanted him back and if he wants something I'll do whatever I can to get it for him. That and Draco looked so scared," she added. "I don't like him either, but I wouldn't have gone off and left anyone unrescued who looked like that." It felt a little like bragging, but she wanted to remind Pansy that she, at least, had been overcoming barriers of house prejudice to help others.

"I used to have a big thing about Draco, until I found out what a manipulative little shit he is," Pansy said dispassionately. "But you're right, he was in a very nasty position. His dad told him - told him the Professor had been killed, and Draco refused to take the Mark because of it. He was afraid his father would force him... So, you don't like Draco, but you'll put up with him for the Professor's sake, and I don't like _you_ much but - the same. Anybody who's all right with the Professor is all right with me, I guess. D'you think you're going to marry him?"

Hermione blushed furiously. "We're not even dating openly yet! How on earth would I know if we're going to make it permanent? I mean... what if he changes his mind when he's better? Or finds someone he likes more than me?" Her voice got unintentionally woeful at that last suggestion. She knew Severus thought it was unlikely, but it worried her a lot. Now that he was a hero, he would find that he was more popular than he'd thought, and there was bound to be competition. "And Draco's actually improved a lot since we retrieved him. I think the shock did him good."

"You're not wrong there. It made him see what's - what's really at stake. What the Death Eaters are like. But it's very romantic, you and the Professor, in a funny way - secret trysts among the flowers and everything..."

"It has been rather romantic, in spots. I do like romance, even if I don't always admit it." Hermione smiled at the thought. "And I do care, very much... you don't need to worry about me breaking his heart, or anything. If... whatever it is we have, I'm not entirely sure how to define it yet... does end, it will be because he wants it to, not because I do."

"I don't think he'd turn out to be a heart-breaker - he's more the obsessive type. Smouldering with secret passion, and that - he might get a bit jealous and possessive, though. I've had ones like that - it can be a bit of a pain."

"It can," Hermione agreed, speaking from the experience of Ron. "I think I'd like it if he did it, though. Caring enough to be jealous over me. Of course, you'd know more about that sort of thing than I would." Damn, that had slipped out... Pansy had definitely Been Around, to put it mildly, as Hermione decidedly had not. She smiled wryly. "Being a scrawny, toffee-nosed bookworm, and all," she added, deciding it was better to concede a bit of her dignity than offend Pansy just when they were almost getting along. "I haven't... well... dated a great deal."

"You've not missed much - there's a distinct lack of talent at Hogwarts, and the few good-looking boys there are nearly always turn out to be gay. Especially as - well, hardly anybody outside Slytherin would date a Slytherin, and we're all climbing the walls, frankly. Especially now. A lot of us... it's bloody-well true what the other houses say, a lot of us _do_ have families with a foot in the Dark Arts, some with parents or aunts or cousins who are Death Eaters. And after what they did to Professor Snape... Nearly all those with Dark-connected families have dumped them or told them where to get off, and the few who are still loyal to the Dark Lord... frankly, I wouldn't be surprized if there's a murder done before long. I wish - I wish the Professor was well enough to be back in charge. He kept the lid on it for years, but now he's sick it's all going to blow."

"Oh dear." Hermione gnawed worriedly on her lower lip. "That's not a good thing... and I'll have to tell him, now that I know. He'd be furious if something happened and I'd known it might and hadn't warned him, and I wouldn't blame him for it, either. I'm not sure what he can do, though. Is there anything I can do? Hex some obnoxious Gryffindors for you or something? The last thing we all need is for more people to get hurt, everyone's hovering on the verge of panic as it is. And Slytherin house has been through quite enough already."

"It's already... the fact that two Gryffindors and a Ravenclaw are working with Draco to help Professor Snape has made some Slytherins believe we _can_ work with the other houses and not be spat at, although I don't really see it myself. But the real problem is inside Slytherin. The ones who - the ones who are loyal to Professor Snape, that's most of us, are scared the ones loyal to the Dark Lord are a threat to him and if one of them puts so much as a toe out of line... I wish I knew what to do."

"I'll ask him. He might have a suggestion... although I'm not going to let him exhaust himself or set himself back." Hermione frowned. "He's... he's better, a lot better, but he's still not... well. But he's under guard, every minute of the day, if that helps. Not just the guards at the door but - we, the people who sit with him, we don't even go to the bathroom without leaving the door open a crack so we can keep watching him, and the house-elves and the Bloody Baron check up on us while we sleep. The Death Eater supporters might want to threaten him, but it wouldn't be easy. We've done our best to make it impossible for anyone who might possibly be a threat to him to get to him."

"It's about bloody time someone took care of him, instead of him always taking care of _them_" Pansy replied with a scowl, and Hermione found herself unexpectedly warming to the girl - even if she did look like a pug in an alice band. It occurred to her suddenly to wonder whether Pansy had made fun of her looks when they were younger because she was almost the only person in their year who was plainer than Pansy - except for Millicent Bulstrode, of course, and no-one wanted to insult _her_ in case she decided to get physical about it.

Pansy looked down at the floor, looking rather miserable. "I really don't want to disturb him when he's - not well, but you're right, he'd be _furious_ if we treated him like a little kid and kept him in the dark. It's his house, after all. His, um, party of resource."

"I know." Hermione reached out to pat Pansy's shoulder awkwardly. "And I am doing my best to take care of him... we all are, but I'm the one who's mad about him, so I put in some extra time." She smiled a bit ruefully. "I'll tell him about it, on my next shift, and see if he can come up with anything to help. Meanwhile, maybe pointing out that he's under constant guard would help?"

"They must know that - most of the guards on him are Slytherin anyway. It's - probably none of them would be stupid enough to try, really. But even the idea anybody in Slytherin could be - OK with what was done to Professor Snape... I'm afraid somebody's going to say something they won't get the chance to regret, you know?"

Hermione thought for a moment. "Maybe you could sort of subtly spread the word that he'd like to handle any further attempts on his life himself?" she suggested. "I imagine there'd be a certain amount of roughing up involved even so, but if the general idea was to grab anyone who hinted at wanting to finish him off and drag them before him, there'd be less risk of them getting badly hurt... and I think he _would_ want to deal with it himself, especially if the alternative was going to get his loyal students in a lot of trouble."

Pansy gave her a sly grin. "Who'd've thought a Gryffindor could be so sneaky? The ones who mutter in corners about him being a traitor who deserved what he got would be _shitting_ themselves at the idea of saying it to his face. They know he could hex their balls off without raising a sweat. Even the girls!"

Hermione smiled sweetly. "He does keep telling me I'd make a good Slytherin."

"Damn - he really does have the hots for you, doesn't he?"

* * *

**Author's note:**

Ron actually cut the lace off his dress robes in GoF, but we're assuming that either his mother mended them (with _Reparo_) or he did it himself, in hopes of making Draco look sillier; although in fact Draco has the looks for lace.

Although the highest-numbered greenhouse which is actually named in the books is Greenhouse Three, we are told in HBP that when it is misty Harry and co. have trouble locating the correct greenhouse. This suggests that there are a lot more than three of them, and/or that they are all mixed up with other appropriate buildings such as potting sheds. The fact that Harry and Hermione use them as cover when approaching the Whomping Willow in PoA also suggests that they extend quite a long way, so either they are very large or there are a lot of them. They are probably used for a lot more than just teaching Herbology classes - growing fruit and veg. out of season for the kitchens, for example - so I'm guessing there are many more than three.

"A great big roaring bull" was what the Great God Om was trying to turn into when he instead got stuck as a tortoise for several years, in Terry Pratchett's novel _Small Gods_.

Sandgreen, with its beach of white shell, is a real coastal area in Galloway in southern Scotland. For complex reasons having to do with the climate, the train-journey and the extremely English-sounding name "Hogsmeade", I think Hogwarts is more likely to be in the Galloway Hills than in the Highlands.

For those who don't know, a _vol au vent_ is a little dollop-shaped puff-pastry case, a couple of inches across. In the centre, sometimes with a puff-pastry lid, sometimes exposed so you can see it, is about a teaspoonful of filling which is usually a sort of pale grey paste made from chicken and mushroom. It really does look like pus - but they don't taste too bad. They used to be a staple of old-fashioned, up-market British teas - wedding receptions, office parties and so on - although they've now largely been replaced by things like spicy chicken wings and miniature spring rolls. Snape's family were too scruffy to go to posh receptions, so he hasn't seen them before.

Crab with egg mayonnaise (that is, hard-boiled eggs chopped finely, seasoned and mixed with mayonnaisse and sometimes chives) is an especially delicious combination.

"It is immoral that a mattress should have so much power. Triumph of that which yields over that which thunders. But it is all the same; glory to the mattress which nullifies a cannon." - quote from _Les Miserables_ by Victor Hugo, describing a scene where mattresses were hung on the walls of buildings under siege, to fend off cannonballs.

"Go down, you blood-red roses" - this is a variant version of the chorus of the traditional sea shanty _Blood Red Roses_, a good version of which can be found on the "Yet Another Digital Tradition Page" at **ht tp / sniff . numachi . com / pages / tiBLOODRED ; ttBLOODRED . html** (just take out the spaces).

The next chapter is going to take a while, because only about a third of it is already written.

This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_, to show that Snape did at least have some friends at school, that Albus was not a very close friend prior to Snape's being injured, and that Albus did strong-arm Snape into becoming a spy in the first instance, even if he agreed fairly willingly.


	20. 18 Treacherous Footing

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

Well, we did promise to have it done by the end of May... Apologies for the delay in getting this out but we were both unwell, **whitehound** with a low-level but incredibly persistent sniffly cold and **Dyce** with a shorter but much more violent bronchitis.

* * *

**18: TREACHEROUS FOOTING**

"I, ah, wanted to talk to you, Draco. About Miss Granger." Which was a lie if ever he'd told one: very nearly the last thing he wanted to do right now was discuss his embryonic love-life with his godson, but he thought he'd better get in first with the facts before Pansy got in with the gossip, and going by what Hermione had told him, there was no time to lose. Trusting to Miss Parkinson's discretion not to spread the news to other houses was one thing: expecting her not to at least drop knowing hints around the Slytherin common room was quite another.

"What about her?" Draco frowned. Granger had seemed to be getting along quite well with his godfather so far - she had even rescued Draco himself to be brought back as a sort of gift for Snape. Which was as embarrassing as hell, but... had they argued or something? Or had she told Snape about some of the things Draco had said to her over the years, and would he now be getting into trouble for them?

Snape rubbed his tongue nervously along the line of the scar inside his cheek. "You, ah, seem to be getting on rather better now than you used to, before... all this." He gestured vaguely at the space where his legs should be - although he was getting better at wearing the prosthetics for quite long periods now.

"I suppose. She saved my life, and yours. I can't exactly... It'd be bloody ungrateful if I started calling her names again, wouldn't it?" Draco ran his hand absently through his hair in a nervous gesture he was only barely aware of making. "She's quite kind, in a bossy way. I didn't know that before."

"She is, indeed, very kind - in a bossy way." He nibbled absently at his own knuckles, until he caught Draco looking at him oddly. But perhaps the boy would put his behaviour down to generalized nervous tension... He could hope, anyway. "And it behoves us both to be - deeply grateful, as galling as that may be considering that the chit is a friend of Potter's. But sometimes kindness and gratitude may mask... something more."

Draco laid his hand tentatively on Snape's shoulder, wanting to be reassuring and not quite knowing how. "She's... I like her," he admitted. "She scares me, a bit, but she's so... determined. Strength of character, you know? I spent years trying to make her cry... or react to me at all, really... and then she charges on in to rescue me as if I'd never said a word." And it was galling to know he'd had so little effect on her, and yet it made him respect her all the more. She was made of bloody granite, under that fluffy hair and prissy manner, and it was reassuring and unnerving all at once.

Delicately steering the conversation obviously wasn't going to work (Draco had never been a particularly observant boy), and a hearty shove was called for. "I'm afraid your attempts to goad her into a reaction would have been so much water off a duck's back, since your opinion was never of much importance to her - I'm sorry, but it's so. _My_ opinion, however, turns out to have been...highly significant."

"I suspected it was. I could always get to the other two, but never to her." Draco paused, as his brain caught up with the rest of that statement. "Your opinion? What do you..." He paused, taking in his godfather's obvious embarrassment mingled with a faint hint of what might just be pride. "Oh. Er. Do you mean that you... uh..."

His godfather blushed, slightly but definitely. "For whatever unaccountable reason, it would appear that Miss Granger finds my opinion, and my approval, highly desirable. And myself," he added in a tiny voice, the blush flaring suddenly to scarlet. "And I - ah - the same."

"You mean the two of you are... oh." Draco found himself blushing more or less in sympathy. He would never have imagined... maybe he might have suspected Hermione of a bit of a crush, she was always trying to impress him in Potions, but... even shattered and vulnerable, it was hard to imagine Snape having a romance with someone so ordinary. Brave, decent, kind, certainly, but somehow Draco had always imagined any potential love interest of his godfather's being more... impressive. To match his swooping, snarling persona.

"That depends on your definition of 'oh'," Snape replied sourly. "We - haven't exactly taken it very far, as yet. There are, as I'm sure you will understand... considerations. Not just the age gap but - " He made a vague, inclusive gesture indicating himself. "Miss Granger - Hermione - was concerned that I should be sure of my own mind and there are - issues, to do with my reactions to, um, intimate contact. I'm sure you'll understand that I have - somewhat mixed feelings. About intimate physical contact."

Draco flinched slightly: his godfather's reasons for having mixed feelings about sex were something he preferred not to contemplate too closely. "I didn't think... I mean, I sort of assumed you hadn't..." His face felt very hot. "But the two of you... like each other?" Oh, that made him sound as if he was about twelve, but it was all coming as a bit of a shock. The idea of Snape and Hermione so much as - well, they did hold hands, he'd seen them, but he hadn't realized it _meant_ things.

"Just because I'm over thirty doesn't mean I've turned into a eunoch!" his godfather snapped, bridling slightly. Not having Gone All the Way with Hermione was one thing; having other people just _assume_ without evidence that he hadn't was quite another. "But yes, we... 'like' each other very much. And since you are, as we discussed, the nearest thing I have to family, I thought that you should hear it from me - and not from Pansy Parkinson, who cornered Hermione after breakfast this morning and nagged her into an admission."

"I didn't think you'd turned into a eunuch!" Draco winced. "But you're only just well enough to sit in a chair now, and Granger - Hermione - she's never seemed to me like the sort of girl who'd... not right off, I mean." He seriously considered trying to drown himself in his godfather's water-jug. "And I am glad to be hearing it from you, even if I'm not exactly being tactful and graceful about it. It's just a bit of a shock."

"Yes, well, I thought it would be even more of a shock coming from Miss Parkinson. And please do bear in mind that this... situation is not common knowledge. In particular, the Headmaster..." He gave a sudden huff of desperate laughter. "And that's a conversation I'm not looking forward to, believe me." He tapped his fingers nervously on the wooden arm of the couch. "When you say that you are - shocked - "

"Well, it's a big... change. From how things were before." Draco frowned, trying to get his thoughts into some sort of order. "And right now you're still sort of shaky and everything, and Hermione can be a bit overwhelming." He shifted uncomfortably. "She hasn't... well... rushed you into anything, has she?" Hermione was strong-willed and a bit inclined to walk roughshod over people if she thought it was for their own good. It was entirely possible that she'd pushed, even if she did seem to be genuinely fond of him.

"Hermione has been punctilious about not rushing me," Snape said, frowning, "but it's possible I may have rushed myself. That's one of the reasons we have been - 'taking things slowly', as the saying goes." And he was damned if he was going to admit to his seventeen-year-old godson that he rather liked bossy women, so long as they weren't drooling sadists or outright screaming harridans.

He snorted suddenly. "Apparently Miss Parkinson thinks it is 'very romantic' - and that makes it all all right! The prospect of the Headmaster demanding my resignation and hexing me into the middle of next week not withstanding." He tapped his fingers again. "But you don't - disapprove in principle?"

"Pansy's always been very hot on romance. I think I always disappointed her a bit there." Draco shook his head. "And... it is romantic, I suppose. I mean, with you being the tragic hero and her being the noble and selfless maiden nursing you back to health..." Snape was staring at him, his mouth slightly open, and Draco blushed again. "Well, it is. It's just like one of the romantic sagas Mother used to read to me when I was little."

"Your mother's reading habits leave a lot to be desired." He wasn't sure how to react: he had expected doubt at the least, not acceptance, and blame - not to be compared to a tragic hero. But he suppose pure-blood attitudes to marriage had a lot to do with it. In the circles his godson moved in, couples married almost as soon as they were out of school, to increase their chances of producing healthy offspring; and a childless man would be expected to seek a partner who was as fertile as possible, regardless of age. "I suppose I should be flattered that the idea that I myself might be - taking advantage seems never to have occurred to you." Or was it simply that Draco didn't care what happened to a Muggle-born - even one to whom he owed his freedom?

"Taking advantage?" Draco stared at him in honest surprise. "Of her? She's made of... of granite and virtue! Victor _Krum_ was nervous about asking her out! And you can't even run away if she decides to smite you!" He realized firstly that he was getting a bit shrill, and secondly that he wasn't being exactly complimentary towards Snape's lady. "I mean, she's pretty enough these days, and kind-hearted, it's just... it's the way she looks at you." With eyes like wide, melting brown gimlets that went straight through and showed all your pitiful flaws.

"I am fairly reliably informed that she looks at me as if I was a wonderful surprise - although I myself would have thought 'horrible shock' was more appropriate." Draco was nine months younger than Hermione and convinced that he was the last word in grown-up sophistication and self-possession, so it was perhaps inevitable that it would not occur to him that Hermione's youthful inexperience might lay her open to manipulation. And it was quite true that anyone who tried it would be taking their life in their hands.

"And Viktor Krum was a surprisingly diffident boy." Or not so surprising: like himself, the Bulgarian Seeker had grown up plain-featured, big-nosed, over-intelligent and awkward, although unlike himself the poor boy had achieved social redemption by turning out to be Good at Games. "But Hermione does have an impressively ruthless streak, I'll grant you."

Draco nodded. "It honestly would never have occurred to me that you might be taking advantage. Maybe if it had been Luna or Pansy or someone, but not Hermione." And that strength and purpose had their own attraction, although they were unnerving too. He grinned suddenly, as a thought struck him. "I suppose that's something you'd have in common, isn't it? Not dating much because everyone's a bit scared of you."

Snape grimaced. "I always assumed that no-one would want to 'date' me anyway, so pre-emptively scaring them off was a way of saving face - yet Hermione assures me that I am the subject of some very flattering obscene graffiti in the girls' bog." According to her, the latest addition was a drawing suggesting that he might have a viable alternative to the missing leg... "I'm not sure whether to believe her or not."

"You've been the target of some very lurid speculations among the seventh-year girls for as long as I've been here, I know that."

His godfather gave a snort of amusement, and then grinned suddenly. "And - Pansy, yes, Pansy is vulnerable to exploitation, as girls who imagine themselves to be man-eaters so often are. But believe me, if you get to know her you'll find that the prospect of anyone 'taking advantage' of Luna Lovegood is even less likely than anyone doing so with Miss Granger. On some levels she's the most terrifying female I've ever met - your festering aunt not excepted. If I'd met her when I was your age, I'd have hid in the lavvy every time she walked past."

Draco grinned back. "Hermione... well, obviously she's not discussed much in Slytherin, being Potter's right-hand girl and all, but I've heard some of the other lads talking about her and the general agreement is 'not half-bad, but who'd dare?'. I mean, besides you, obviously." He thought it over. "And is Lovegood really that bad? She always seems terribly harmless... which should be a clue, I suppose."

"What have I always told you, Draco?" Really, the boy was scarcely paranoid enough to survive in Slytherin, despite his upbringing. "The genuinely harmless ones appear harmless, but so do most of the ones who are plotting against you. Miss Lovegood is..." He nibbled absentmindedly on the side of his hand, trying to think it through verbally. "She is alone, even more than I was, and she believes that not being alone would be preferable, pleasant - but in the vague sort of way that one thinks that coming into money and moving to the south of France would be pleasant. Being alone doesn't actually _trouble_ her, as such, and if people are unpleasant to her she regards them with the mild interest of an anthropologist confronted by a rather boring foreign tribe. There are no levers to push in her, no triggers by which an enemy could destabilise her - the most one could rouse her to would be a cold dislike, which she would then pursue ruthlessly.

"She would never - " He shuddered convulsively. "She would never do to anyone one thousandth of the things that Bellatrix would do. Has done. If she hated someone enough to kill them, she wouldn't t-torture them, gloat over them, waste time faffing about _humiliating_ them and prolonging their literal bloody agony until fate gave them a chance to escape her. She would simply kill them, without hesitation and without more than a vague twitch of remorse, and then get on with doing something else she found more interesting. Looking for Vampire Daisies, probably."

Draco nodded. "You do know how to find them," he said, feeling a bit awed. "The tough ones, I mean. Pansy likes to think she's tough, but Hermione and Lovegood..." He shook his head. "And I'm glad, really. That's the sort of person I want protecting you. Someone who'll just annihilate anyone who tries to attack you without wringing their hands over the relative morality of it."

"Neither of them, I imagine, would gratuitously employ more force than was necessary - but neither of them would hesitate to use _as much_ force as was necessary." He scowled, restlessly tapping his remaining fingers on his one remaining knee. "Which brings me on to the other subject I wanted to discuss with you. Miss Parkinson apparently told Miss Granger that there may be some highly unnecessary force applied in all directions quite soon, if I don't do something to defuse the tension in the Slytherin common room." Draco's prolonged absence had meant that his prefect's badge had had to be passed on to Blaise Zabini but Blaise, unfortunately, was more interested in admiring himself in the mirror than in exerting any sort of stabilising influence on his house-mates.

Draco nodded. "I don't hear as much of it as I used to... casting aside my loyalties to the Dark Lord to rush to your side and all. There's a certain strange belief going around that I'm doggedly loyal to you and tell you everything." Inconvenient, yes, but he was proud of it. "Pansy would know more about it than I do. But there is tension, yes, a lot of it. The situation is... complicated, right now, isn't it? There's you, there's _him_, and now instead of being proper enemies half of Gryffindor are suddenly putative allies instead, which adds a whole other level of confusion to an already murky situation. It's getting very... confused."

"Ironic that I of all people might be the trigger for an outbreak of inter-house co-operation - though I suppose it's satisfying to think that Black and Potter Senior would have apoplexy if they knew. But... Miss Parkinson rather presented it as a straight stand-off between a majority who were loyal to me and a minority who think that I - that I got what I fucking-well deserved. But I imagine it's more complex than that. Until the Headmaster dropped what I gather was a very public Hallowe'en bombshell about my activities as a spy, most Slytherins imagined that loyalty to me and loyalty to - Riddle were compatible." And what, he wondered, of the stalwart handful of Slytherins who had always distrusted and disliked him _because_ they thought he was Riddle's man?

"Exactly. Now... now it's you _or_ him, with no middle ground at all, and siding with you also means siding with Dumbledore and at least some of the Gryffindors, and siding with... with Riddle is just like saying you deserved what he did to you, and..." Draco shook his head. "It's... difficult. And being Slytherins, our natural response to this kind of... of breakdown in the hierarchy is to start clawing our way upwards, only it's a bit difficult to tell which _way_ is up." He smiled ruefully. "I'm fairly confident of my chosen direction, but I think some of the others are really envying Blaise his clearly defined loyalty to his mirror right now."

"I'm going to have to call a House Council and make some sort of speech - God." He swayed suddenly, feeling the room swim and tilt, and Draco caught him by the shoulders as swiftly as if he were a Snitch and eased him back against the back of the couch.

"Steady now, that's all right - " the boy murmured, and Snape made a dour, self-disgusted face.

"Bloody fool - me, that is. It's just - I've barely been out of these rooms once since - since I was... and the thought of trying to chair a meeting - but I'm going to have to, I think. I've asked Miss Parkinson and Miss Bulstrode and some of their, ah, troops to meet me here at six pm to discuss the situation, and I'd appreciate it if you would take over the, um, guard detail while we are talking."

"Sure. As for the House Council - we'll arrange something. If nothing else, you could have Hermione and Lovegood and Longbottom with you. We're all used to the idea of them caring for you, really, and anyone who complains is going to get a bloody thick ear if Millie has anything to say about it. She says she doesn't give a damn about the politics or what her family say - you've always done right by us and she intends to do the same." Draco was pleased to be able to say that - Millicent Bulstrode wasn't a swift thinker, but she did get there eventually, and once she'd made up her mind you'd probably get further arguing with a stone wall than with her.

"Grateful though I am to all of them - more than grateful, in Hermione's case - I do feel that inviting them into a full meeting of Slytherin House would be a step too far. My students will find it hard enough to speak openly in front of each other, under the circumstances, without the presence of outsiders, so I will just have to rely on your good offices and hope not to have a bloody panic-attack. At least knowing that Miss Bulstrode is on my side should prevent any of the pro-Riddle faction from getting physical about it - and I'll have Horace Slughorn for backing, in any case."

He let his head fall back, closing his eyes against the brightness of the window and feeling the beginnings of a headache coming on. "But Longbottom will be there this evening when I speak to Miss Parkinson - I'll need _some_body with me, and having Longbottom in the room nursemaiding me and you outside overseeing the guard will be less problematic than the other way round. And besides - every Slytherin who is present will be one of the group who've been guarding me, there's no doubt about where their loyalties lie, so they should have no problems about speaking freely in front of each other and him." He opened his eyes again and looked at his godson's anxious face, the cropped silver hair haloed by sunlight. "I'm tired, Draco. Help me to get across to the bed."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"It's bloody difficult - saving your pardon, sir." Millicent scowled impressively. "Before it was - well, it was easy, because people thought you were a - you know, one of his lot, so loyalty to the Dark Lord and loyalty to you were the same thing. Now suddenly they're really these complete opposites - there're people who only ever followed the Dark Lord because they thought they were following you, and now they don't know whether to be relieved or to hate you for leading them astray, and people who followed you second and the Dark Lord first and now they've got to work out which they prefer, and people who would always be yours, or always the Dark Lord's, regardless - and people like Billy Battersby who was always against you _because_ he thought you were the Dark Lord's man don't know which way is up, now."

Vincent Crabbe nodded dourly. "Caught him sniffling in the broomshed, didn't I, because he felt so badly about getting you all wrong." He glowered at Neville, daring him to make something of it.

Severus looked at them over his steepled fingers: the prosthetic was getting easier and easier to endure for long periods although the re-awakened nerves in his shoulder still plucked at his awareness. "Please tell Mr Battersby and - and anyone else who may be in the same position that I bear them no ill-will for having been opposed to what they supposed to be a Death Eater - so long as they watch their attitude now they know that I am no such thing."

"Yeah." The boy nodded vigorously. "There's some people still loyal to old You-Know-Who but most of us - me 'n Greg and Teddy Nott 'n Pansy and everyone, we decided, if it had to be one or the other we're with you, all the way."

"It's remarkable, really," Daphne Greengrass said, examining her own nails. "Because of you, the Dark Lord looks like losing almost an entire generation of recruits."

She glanced up and Severus smiled at her rather tightly. "In which case, I suppose I should be glad of what happened to me, not - not resentful." Neville's hand crept almost invisibly along the back of the couch to give his shoulder a reassuring little pat.

"_We_ resent it," Nigel Hennessy said seriously, his pale, freckly face taut behind the enormous glasses, "and we resent anybody who's OK with what they did to you. More than resent." Behind him, the door stood ajar to allow the Slytherins in the corridor to listen in if they wished to; but they seemed to be having a quite different conversation, to judge from the brittle crackle of voices which seeped through the door.

"We all know there are some who do - think it was OK, I mean," Pansy muttered. "I don't know which is worse - openly admitting it, or pretending they don't think it when they do. Either way there's likely to be murder done, but at least if they admit it we know who to hit."

"And if I hit them, they'll stay hit" Millie muttered darkly.

"Touched as I am by your partisanship on my behalf," Severus began wryly, "I really must insist - " He paused, distracted, hearing Draco's voice outside suddenly raised but it was nothing threatening, evidently, since Draco was wearing his smugly urbane sophisticate's voice today.

"...but I said to him," his godson's smoothest tones drawled: "Weasel, there are those of us who can wear lace, and those of us who emphatically _can't_."

Someone outside laughed, and Daphne Greengrass joined in, a shrill, tinny giggle at the sound of which Snape's world abruptly shattered into nightmare. He stared at her for one frozen, appalled moment and she met his eyes and suddenly her wand was in her hand, he lunged for his own wand in impossible slow motion but time stretched out like melting toffee and it was too far out of reach, the words of death were already in her mouth and nobody else had realized - with an inarticulate yell of fury Neville hurled himself scrambling across the corner of the couch and bore Daphne to the ground as the bolt of green light from her wand went wild, scoring a smoking gouge across the ceiling.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"T-t-twenty points to Gryffindor," he burbled, his teeth rattling with shock, "for impressive reflexes and c-constant bloody vigilance, but remember it's a one-off and not a p-precedent or Minerva will never let me live it down."

"That's all right" Neville said, without taking his eyes or his wand off the captive, although she was well and truly caught, her hands bound behind her back and gripped firmly in Vincent's meaty paw.

Pansy pressed the tip of her wand up under Daphne's chin, forcing her to look up. "Why?" she demanded.

"Why?" the other girl snarled, her eyes vivid with hate. "You dance attendance on this - this snivelling filth who betrayed everything you were supposed to hold dear, who tried to sell your own father to the Aurors Pansy Parkinson and you ask me why?"

Pansy gave a snarl of inarticulate rage and shoved the other girl roughly against the wall, raising her hand as if to strike her.

"Miss Parkinson!" Snape said sharply. "I appreciate your partisanship as well but we will do this by the book, if you please." He lurched shakily to his feet (he was at last starting to think of them as his feet and not Filius's feet) and approached Greengrass, who glared at him and opened her mouth as if to spit - but before she could do so he had placed her in a strong Body-Bind, and then tapped her frozen form sharply on the top of the head with his wand, spreading a screen of Disillusionment over her. Alerting Padma Patil to the fact that her co-conspirator had been apprehended would simply prompt her to run.

"Crabbe, Bulstrode, Hennessy - take this - person to the Headmaster's office and you, Parkinson - find Professor Moody and ask him to meet us there. Mr Malfoy - " Draco looked at him, his face even whiter than usual and pinched in about the mouth with shock. "You and Longbottom will have to help me to get there myself. You two - " He looked at the remaining guards, who had been innocently talking to Draco in the corridor when one of their own had come within a hair's breadth of killing him - "Brooksmith, stay here and make sure nobody breaks into my rooms while I am gone. Anwar, come with us and clear the way for me, please."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

It was only hours later that it occurred to him that he could have saved himself a lot of effort and had Albus and Alastor come down to the dungeons and interrogate Daphne where she was. At the time, his immediate reaction was to want her out of his rooms as fast as possible, taking the taste of remembered pain and corruption with her. The private revolving stair at the end of the corridor took him the cliff's height from the waterside up to the level of his office, and from there he was so angry and excited that he made it almost to the stairs leading up to the Entrance Hall before the damnable left leg folded under him, and Draco had to grab him around the chest to prevent him from measuring his length on the cold stone floor.

For a moment, he felt panic close around him like an icy hand, so that he struggled to breath. He was out of his rooms, vulnerable, condemned to creep like a tortoise while his enemies leapt and bit like lightning - but then common-sense caught up with him and he realized that he was far safer now, with Greengrass in custody, than he had been for the past five months with her intermittently outside his door, poised for one of his carers to make a slip and leave him alone for a few lethal seconds. The knowledge that it was one of his Slytherin guards, one of the youths he had come to trust absolutely, who had laughed to see him arching and convulsing in agony was terrifying, disorienting - but when he held his mint-new paranoia up against Draco and Longbottom to see if it fitted, he could not find it in him to doubt them, even so.

He could stand, like a sagging drunk, with one arm around each of their shoulders, but fixed stairs were beyond him. "You'll have to get me up the stairs with Mobilicorpus" he said, swallowing his pride. "Malfoy - you do it." His new-found affection for Longbottom didn't extend to trusting the boy not to steer him into a wall. "Anwar - clear people out of the way as best you can, and for the love of Merlin _watch out for the Patil sisters_ and don't let them anywhere near me."

"Do you mean that Parvati - " Longbottom began, his eyes round and horrified. Snape shook his head.

"Padma. At least, so I believe. But I've no absolute proof that her sister wasn't involved; nor that Padma might not dress in Gryffindor colours to fool us." It was so lovely, being targeted by a twin. "Now, get me up these damned stairs."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Albus met them halfway down the marble stairs, his heliotrope robes flying out behind him in his haste, and seized his friend's hands in both of his: though Severus dared not return the clasp in case he hurt the old man's blackened claw of a hand. His saving that hand had been one of the things which had roused Bellatrix's suspicions and led ultimately to his being captured, and he wished absently that he could have done a better job, for all the pain that it had cost him.

The Headmaster's firm grasp wasn't just a gesture of friendship: he could feel magical strength pouring into him from Albus like a river filling up a dry bed. The boys let him down onto the steps and he staggered as his feet found marble and Albus shifted his grip to his upper arms, holding him saggingly upright. He could feel both, although the old man's hold on the real, flesh and blood arm and on the prosthetic felt subtly different.

"Severus - " Severus dragged his head up with an effort, feeling dizzy, to meet the Headmaster's gaze, and Albus clicked his tongue at him. "I won't tell you you shouldn't have tried to walk to my office, since I am very glad to see you able to get so far - but let me take you the rest of the way now, do." He made a complex gesture with his wand, coaxing and pulling, and the segment of stair under their feet shifted alarmingly and then began to flow upwards, taking them smoothly with it.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Filius is back", Albus murmured to him quietly, as the three students followed at a discreet distance. "He got back just a few hours ago. I explained the situation to him and showed him the - relevant memory earlier, and he has gone to fetch Miss Patil."

"Did he - was he successful?"

"He has the Hufflepuff cup, yes - although what we shall do with it I don't know, as Pomona is insisting that it be preserved without damage, and I do see her point of view. But that can wait until this - present matter is resolved."

"Until two of our own students have either succeeded in murdering a staff member," the other man gasped, breathless with the effort of staying upright, "or been packed off to Azkaban. This is not what we signed up for, Albus."

"This is war," the other man replied grimly.

From the top of the main stair, Albus swept him along the corridors and around corners in his own tight, discreet Mobilicorpus, which felt almost like being on roller-skates although by now Severus was sick and giddy, and being whirled through the castle like some sort of puppet only increased his disorientation. The tide of energy and rage which had propelled him from his rooms had washed through him and died away, as all tides did, and left him cold and scared, the whole height of cliff and castle and half the castle's length away from the safe nest which had suddenly become a trap.

The guardian gargoyle sprang aside at the password ("Soor Plooms") and let them onto the stair, which whisked them higher. At a nod from Albus, Draco and Neville followed, leaving Anwar to make her way back downstairs and rejoin Brooksmith, who must be both bored and scared on his own down there. When they reached the top, Severus disengaged himself shakily from Albus's arm and smoothed his robes into some sort of order; determined to make an entrance on his own feet, or what passed for his own feet these days, and with as much billow and snap as he could muster.

The door opened to Albus's command and Severus swept through it in the old man's wake like a personified storm-cloud, to find all four Slytherins - Crabbe, Bulstrode, Hennessy, Parkinson - a sullen looking Greengrass, both Patil sisters (wearing identical expressions of honest confusion), Filius Flitwick, Minerva, Nymphadora Tonks (whom somebody had evidently summoned from Hogsmeade at impressive speed, probably by broom) and Alastor Moody all crammed into the room ahead of them...

...Alastor who had always hated and distrusted him, Alastor who had connived at his being tortured once before, all those years ago; who had tried to convince Albus to leave him to rot in Azkaban. As he gave a tiny, stiff nod of acknowledgment, from one Order member to another, he saw the other man's ill-matched eyes drawn as by magnets to stare at the scars which sliced across his cheeks, and then the old Auror dropped his gaze, discomfited.

Nymphadora, on the other hand, gave her old Potions master a thoughtful, appraising look. He hooded his eyes at her, daring her to be cheeky, and the shadow of a grin flitted across her face.

The circular room looked less like a summary court of inquiry and more like a wedding in a marquee, with fifteen, no, sixteen people in it - Albus and Filius both in gaudy colours - jammed in among the little tables and the silver knickknacks, with Fawkes making the sixteenth, bobbing his head and flourishing his fiery crest amusedly from his perch by the door. All it wanted, Severus thought, was cocktails and little nibbles on sticks, and for a hysterical moment he was tempted to call the house elves to provide some. It was only the knowledge that his legs wouldn't bear him which prevented him from turning tail and bolting.

Filius hopped up from the best guest chair, anxious and solicitous, and Severus sank into it gratefully and concentrated on schooling his racing heart and projecting an appearance of cool disdain rather than barely-controlled panic. But then, he was an expert, having been doing it for most of his life.

"I, ah," Filius began apologetically, "I found Miss Patil visiting her sister, so..."

"You couldn't tell which of 'em was which, so you brought 'em both," Alastor said grimly.

"Quite." The little man smiled anxiously at Severus, his eyes crinkling up in concern, and the younger man winced behind his rigid composure - realizing that only that afternoon Filius had seen his memory of himself flopping and twisting in the bottom of the boat, shorn of all dignity and all sanity. "I'm so glad to see you - looking better."

Severus inclined his head, a tiny nod, and gripped the arms of the chair until his knuckles whitened. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Filius squinting at his hands, trying to appraise how well he was managing the prosthetic without appearing to do so.

Albus sat down composedly behind his desk, becoming again the Headmaster and not just Severus's friend, and steepled his long fingers under his chin, looking at the three quasi-prisoners. After an uncomfortably long pause, he tapped his conjoined index fingers against his lips and said "I presume you know why you have been brought here?"

Daphne Greengrass shrugged and jerked her head as if to spit towards her house-master, but the two Patil girls looked honestly bewildered. One shook her head and "No, Headmaster, nobody's told us anything," and the other added "Professor Flitwick just said you wanted to speak to us, sir." At least one of them, presumably, was lying.

"Miss Greengrass was apprehended whilst apparently making an attack on Professor Snape. We have reason to think that one of you may have been... involved, along with Miss Greengrass, in smuggling Professor Snape into the school when he was injured last year."

"But that's - the person who did that was a Death Eater, surely?" the twin on the left said, sounding honestly confused. It ought to have been possible to tell which twin was which by their house-patches and by Padma's Prefect badge, but the girls had evidently been playing some kind of sport when Filius found them, and were both stripped down to skirt and blouse.

"We don't even know Daphne, sir, except that we're all in Charms and I used to have Potions with her" the other said - so that one was Parvati. Or claiming to be. "But I've never talked to her outside of class, I don't think. And why - why would we want to hurt Professor Snape? Sir?" She looked at Snape, puzzled and pleading.

"Because it pleased Cormac McLaggen to hurt me, for whatever reason, and whatever pleases McLaggen, pleases his... paramours" he replied tightly, curling his lip.

_"Cormac??"_ probably-Parvati exclaimed, but her sister was silent.

"Let's just deal with the one we know is guilty, first," Alastor growled, "and get her out of the way and into Azkaban where she belongs." Snape winced; whatever she had done, Greengrass was one of his students, his responsibility. If he had been quicker on the draw he might have killed her - and that might have been kinder.

"Very well," the Headmaster replied sombrely. "Mr Longbottom, if you would begin, please, by telling us in your own words what happened this evening."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

At least Greengrass made no attempt to deny her guilt or her attempted use of an Unforgivable, and her open contempt for the man who had been her house-father for almost seven years was both a relief and a horror, as Neville and the Slytherin party gave their accounts of what had occurred earlier that evening. Later, examining Aurors Moody and Tonks would deposit their Pensieved memories of the evidence, and if there were any subsequent queries the witnesses would also be called on to confirm their version of events by Pensieve. Neville positively glowed and gained about an inch in height when the Headmaster promised to write a letter to his grandmother, commending his courage and quick thinking, and Pansy, Millie, Vincent and Nigel Hennessy were awarded fifteen house-points each for competence and cool-headedness. Snape forbore to point out that he had had to restrain Pansy from beating Daphne up: a house-point was a house-point, after all.

Having given evidence, the four Slytherin witnesses and Neville were thanked profusely and sent on their way and the room became somewhat less crowded. Draco, glowering ominously and clutching his wand like a whip, was permitted to remain as his godfather's assistant, as the informal court moved on to examining the suspects themselves.

As Head of Slytherin it fell to Snape to interrogate Daphne Greengrass himself. He would have liked to have stood, imposingly, to have paced and purred as he would have done when he had a whole body and an intact throat; but wobbling and croaking wasn't going to impress anybody especially when she knew, intimately, how maimed and ruined he was, so he contented himself with leaning back in the chair with his ("his") feet casually extended and his dark hair framing his face, and looking down his long nose at her. He looked, although he would have been surprised to be told it, like some austere Mediaeval monarch or churchman, robed and enthroned.

"Miss Greengrass," he began, steadily: "do you admit that this evening at approximately six ten you attempted to use the Killing Curse upon me, without my having in any way attacked or endangered you?"

Greengrass jerked her head, flicking her fringe out of her eyes in an irritable gesture, and shrugged. "You were going for your wand."

"And if I had succeeded in reaching it do you believe that I would have harmed you, if you hadn't fired on me first?"

Her lips curled, scornfully. "I knew once you'd recognized me I wouldn't get another chance at you, so it was now or never."

"Do you then admit that - that you knew that I might have recognized you as being one of the group who conveyed me into the castle when I was - injured?"

He saw her notice the slight hesitation and enjoy it. "Oh yes," she said with a tight-mouthed, contemptuous smirk which burned him with the knowledge of how she had seen him, how he had been in front of her.

"And your - reasons for doing so were...?"

"What do _you_ think, you craven, snivelling traitor?" she said softly, and his head snapped back in a sudden rush of fury, revulsion and exasperation as Draco made a convulsive movement and Albus half rose from his seat, a sound of protest forming on his lips -

"Stupid girl!" Snape snapped at her, before the old man could speak or the young one fire. "Don't you even have the damned sense to claim coercion?" and Greengrass laughed, the same cold, tinny laugh which had sounded over him as he lay in the bottom of the boat with his belly cut open and Cormac McLaggen's booted foot lashing into him, until his throat constricted in terror and his stomach swam with nausea, and he found himself unexpectedly grateful to Alastor Moody for stepping in and taking over the interrogation: even though the sound of the old Auror's voice, questioning, probing, demanding answers was itself enough to bring him out in a cold sweat - the echo of what had been, until it was superseded by the events of last year, one of the most personally terrifying memories of his life...

As he slumped back in the chair, struggling to breathe without making a fool of himself by letting anybody see that he was struggling to breathe, Draco moved sideways an inch, almost invisibly, so that his fingers on the chair's back brushed against his godfather's neck. The older man bore against that tenuous anchor, his pulse fluttering against Draco's skin.

Since Greengrass was of-age and had been apprehended whilst attempting to perform an Unforgivable on another human, and without any clear mitigating need for self-defence, Severus supposed that in truth the admission that she was a Death Eater sympathizer and a torturer could hardly make her situation worse. But she refused point-blank to admit to any connection with either of the Patil twins. "Such _good_ little girls," she said, maliciously, and they both looked unsure whether to be flattered or offended, and it was hard to tell which, if either, was acting.

Filius fluttered his hands unhappily. "Miss Patil - Misses Patils," he began, and stopped to clear his throat. "Having viewed an excerpt from Professor Snape's memory - well, the image is unclear, admittedly, but I have to say that the voice - one of the voices - does appear to me to be Padma's."

"That's ridiculous," probably-Parvati said. "I'm sorry, sir, but it is."

Her sister nodded. "You know me, sir - you've known me since I was a child. Do you really think...?"

"It isn't a matter of what any of us think, Miss Patil," the Headmaster chimed in softly, "but of what Professor Snape heard."

"But - " Probably-Parvati looked at Minerva, her (probably) house-mother. "It must have been somebody using Polyjuice; it _can't_ have been Padma, I just know it."

"That is a distinct possibility," Minerva acknowledged with an inclination of the head. "When you say you know it cannot have been your sister, do you mean that you had her in view at the time that Professor Snape was being - conveyed?"

"No, but - she just wouldn't."

"In that case," Tonks said suddenly, "you won't mind taking Veritaserum, any of you, will you?"

"Nymphadora," Snape said sourly, and was pleased to see her wince slightly. If he had to put up with "Severus", she could damned-well put up with her own ridiculous name, and the girl was an offence to the eye in any case - since she seemed to have been amusing herself by turning her hair into a close copy of Fawkes's crest. "Miss Greengrass must be a skilled Occlumens to have avoided detection by me for five months, and if you remembered one quarter of what your employers have attempted to teach you you would know that Veritaserum is unlikely to be effective against an Occlumens. She will have schooled herself to give false answers to anything you wish to ask her about myself or about her... putative association with Miss Patil, and if Miss Patil is indeed guilty she will almost certainly have received the same training.

"From Bellatrix Lestrange," he added under his breath, with a small shudder, and felt Draco's finger move against his skin in a tiny stroking gesture.

"Humour me," Tonks replied, with a steely glint, and it occurred to him suddenly that Bellatrix was her aunt as much as she was Draco's.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"There was no-one else in the boat," Greengrass said steadily. "No-one but me and McLaggen and this - this." Draco's fingers bit convulsively into Snape's shoulder, making him wince. "He," she said with a jerk of her head towards her house-master, "remembered it wrong. He was too busy snivelling and begging to bother to count us - until Cormac silenced him."

"A fact which will be added to the charge-sheet against McLaggen when we catch up with him," Moody growled, his blue eye swivelling surreally from girl to girl, "and I'll make sure he knows who told it to us."

For the barest fraction of a second, Greengrass flinched; but unlike her eyes, her story never wavered, Veritaserum or no Veritaserum. The Patils were the same; it was impossible to tell whether either of them was lying or sincerely innocent. Even Legilimency might not do it, and was in any case too subjective to be used as evidence in a court of law unless the Legilimens was an accredited court official.

"You've never had any dealings with Greengrass here out of class, then?" Tonks said cheerfully.

"No, I told you. I do Charms and Arithmancy with her and my sister does Charms too and does - did Potions with her. But I've never spoken to her out of class except - you know, 'Have you heard that Friday's class has been cancelled?', that sort of stuff."

"Where were you when Professor Snape was brought into the school?"

"It was in the early morning, wasn't it? I expect I was in bed - or in the shower, maybe."

"That's fine, Miss Patil. For the record, then, what are your feelings about Professor Snape?"

Probably-Padma blinked and glanced briefly at the Potions master, and then studiously away. "He's... a bad-tempered, mannerless git but he really knows his stuff and he - sexy voice," she finished in an embarrassed mumble.

"Cormac any good in bed, then?"

"No, he finishes too - fast - "

There was an awful, frozen pause and then Daphne Greengrass shrieked "You cow!" and leapt at Padma, her hands reaching like claws as Moody's shot just missed her. "You absolute bloody cow you swore you weren't shagging him - "

"Everybody got to shag Cormac, practically," Tonks said with a grin, flicking her wand to cast restraining cords around both girls, who seemed to be trying to tear each other's hair out by the roots. "He was notorious for it, even in first year. Did you know he had a full beard when he was twelve?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

After that, it was easy. In the passion of sudden jealousy Greengrass had lost all control over her tongue under Veritaserum - wasn't even bothering to try, as far as Padma was concerned - and the incriminating evidence came spilling out of her out in a torrent of rage. It wasn't enough for a conviction on its own but it was more than enough to commit both girls for trial, and to justify further investigation by Pensieve and by court-sanctioned Legilimency.

"Why?" Parvati demanded, weeping, and her sister looked at her coldly.

"Because I'm not you and I don't wish to be you."

"But - but how could you do such an awful thing to - to Professor Snape? Hindus are supposed to respect life - "

"I don't want to be Mummy's good little Hindu," Padma snarled. "I don't want to be Mummy's good little anything. I should have been Head Girl instead of that Abbott cow and you can't tell me _that_ wasn't rigged - both bloody Hufflepuffs. But instead I just get to be a _good little girl_."

"But - why something so awful? Why not - drugs or something, not that that wouldn't have been awful but - "

Her twin watched her with cool detachment. "Because it was something I knew you wouldn't do." As Tonks took her arm and turned her away to walk her to the Apparition point, her gaze swept across Snape's and their eyes locked for a moment.

"Was I so - evil," he said bitterly, "or of so little value, that you felt justified in doing _that_ to me just to assert your bloody individuality?"

She had the grace to look discomfited for a moment. "I'm sorry" she said remotely. "At the time, it didn't seem to matter. You didn't really look like anything human."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

After that, it was just mopping up. A sniffling Parvati apologized disjointedly to Snape (who answered her equally distractedly in a voice which seemed to himself to be coming down a narrow, echoing pipe from a very long way away), and then was led away to the hospital wing by Minerva. Albus, looking grave and unhappy, briefly re-opened the Floo connection between his office and Snape's sitting room and sent a pale, subdued Draco through to check that the coast was clear. When the blond head reappeared at knee-level and confirmed that Anwar and Brooksmith were still on guard and no Death Eaters had managed to break into his godfather's quarters and booby-trap them, Severus rose to his feet, stiff and wobbly, and without waiting for Albus to support him he propelled himself into the dizzying whirl of the flames.

Draco caught him at the other end and he stumbled to the bed and crashed down awkwardly across the covers, clawing ineffectually at his left shoulder. Albus came through the fire a moment later and he and Draco between them helped Severus to struggle out of the prostheses and his robes and into a nightshirt, and tucked him under the covers, which Albus thought was the best thing for him. It was impossible to ask Severus himself what he wanted since he seemed unable to speak, only whimpering thinly and continuously whilst seemingly unaware that he was doing so. Albus sat down on the bed next to him and tried to take the younger man in his arms but his friend shoved him away and curled up on his side, shaking violently.

Draco shared a moment of unhappy fellow-feeling with the Headmaster - a remarkable thing in and of itself - and then slid down to sit on the floor by the bedside. "Severus", he said quietly, sliding his fingers under the blankets and patting his godfather's hand. "Uncle Severus, look at me - please?" Snape groaned and curled up tighter, still shaking, but he stopped whimpering and his long fingers closed around Draco's and held on hard.

Albus got up from the bed and padded quietly to the corner of the room, where he put the kettle on and began to brew a cup of Neville's soothing herbal tea. By the time it was ready to drink, Severus had calmed down and caught his breath enough to be helped to sit up and swallow it, in slow, shuddering sips. While he was drinking, Minerva arrived at the door, looking pale and tired.

"Poppy has given Miss Patil a sedative and is going to keep her in overnight" she murmured to Albus. He uncurled himself to his full height, rather stiffly, and gave Snape's shoulder an unhappy little pat.

"Severus I - I have to go now, you understand, and speak to Miss Patil's and Miss Greengrass's parents. Minerva will sit with you until - until you no longer need her there." Severus looked up and gave him a blank, blinded look and then nodded once before looking back down at his tea, his hair falling down around his face. The willowherb was gradually taking the edge off his panic but he still felt as if he was looking at the room through the wrong end of a telescope, as if he were balanced on some high insecure place from which he would soon inevitably fall.

Minerva sat down decorously on the side of the bed which Albus had just vacated, and exchanged a worried look with Draco. "Severus," she said quietly, "I am sorry that you should have had to be a witness to that, in your condition, but they are at least now both in custody and away from you."

Her friend raised his head, dazedly, and opened his mouth as if to speak to her, but as he did so another shaking fit took him. The cup fell from his hand, rolled off the bed and was fielded by Draco before it could smash on the stone-cold floor as Severus toppled forwards and sideways and was wretchedly, violently sick.

It was at that precise moment that Hermione appeared in the doorway. She rushed to his side as Minerva performed a rapid Evanesco, cleaning both him and the bedclothes. "Oh Se - Professor." She knelt down next to Draco and laid her hand on Severus's side. "Neville found me and told me what happened: I came straight down as soon as I knew you'd finished in the Headmaster's office - "

He nodded, jerkily, not trusting himself to speak without throwing up again. He was on his right side with his arm under him and was able to lever himself up and back into a sitting position without help, although the exertion made him gasp.

"Do you - would you like to be held?" Minerva asked awkwardly, drawing the bed-head up into a support for him with a flick of her wand and making a half gesture of reaching out towards him.

He shook his head, still feeling light-headed and strange. "No good, is it?" he said dully in his ruined voice. "All a lie."

"All _what_ is a lie?"

"Pretending - " He made a vague gesture which included himself. "Pretending that I can ever be - human again."

"Oh, come now, Severus, just because that silly girl - "

"Little cow," added Draco under his breath, and Hermione, who was out of her depth, turned to him and murmured "What? What happened?"

"That Patil cow - Padma," he muttered back. "Said helping McLaggen torture him was nothing personal, it just hadn't seemed to matter because he didn't look human at the time."

"Oh! Oh, Severus, what an awful thing to say!"

"Truth - truth is often... awful" he said painfully. "Never be human again - dirty - " He began to claw neurotically at his own chest and shoulder until Minerva caught his hand and forced it down.

"Stop - stop it!" she snapped. "I won't have it. I won't have you losing all the - the progress you've made just because of some silly girl - "

"But she - she told the truth. It would have been better if it had been personal I could have - coped with that better, but I was never - my life was never of any bloody value to anybody."

"Of course it was!" Minerva protested, as Draco and Hermione chimed in in agreement. "You know - you must know that we care for you a very great deal."

"Oh, now - _now_ because you feel bloody guilty and I'm a, a supplicant you can play at being kind to but you never - _You_," he snarled, rounding on Draco suddenly, "you left me there, you just hoped your bloody father would keep his word and finish me off but you didn't care enough to find out and you - Granger - fine words _now_ but who bloody left me to bleed in the Shrieking Shack and didn't even bother to call Poppy, because it didn't matter to any of you whether I lived or died?"

"I - no, that's not true, I - "

"Don't bloody lie to me."

"I - I asked Professor Lupin..."

"Whom you had no reason to think had medical knowledge of any kind, but you were prepared to let my life hang on a vague reassurance from an amateur."

Hermione stared at him helplessly and couldn't think what to say, Severus looked wild and mad and she knew that it was quite true: however much she cared about him now - however much she would die or kill for him now - at the time she had mainly been worried about getting into trouble, and had just vaguely hoped that he would be all right, without exerting herself to make sure of it. Tears started in her eyes and he sneered at her, bitterly.

"The truth always hurts, doesn't it?" At that moment he wanted to lash out at her, to drive her away, not to have to deal with her desire and her affection which could not be anything but false or misplaced, and which in any case seemed like far too little and very much too late.

"Severus," Minerva said uneasily, "you know that Miss Granger was only a child at the time, that Mr Malfoy was in grave danger - you must know you're being unfair to them both."

He dropped his head and wrapped his arm around himself, rocking, crazy - knowing distantly that he was acting crazy but not knowing how to stop, not wanting to see Hermione's quiet tears, Draco's pinched-faced guilt. "And when was anyone ever fair to me? Were _you_? Black's attempt to murder me wasn't even a crime to you."

"Only because I thought him too deranged to be capable of criminal responsibility," Minerva replied grimly. "He was - Albus and I both knew that he was under a great deal of stress at that time due to the behaviour of his mother, who was frankly insane - and I'm afraid that her madness was at least partly heritable."

"Then he should have been sent to St Mungo's, not - not left here to go on sneering at me, gloating about how _unimportant_ I was - "

"I'm sorry. But you must know that the publicity which would have resulted from expelling him would have risked bringing disaster on Remus Lupin, who was as much Sirius's victim on that occasion as you were - yes, he was. If he had killed or infected you because of what Black did, he would have been condemned to Azkaban - very possibly Kissed. And Albus had already... Black was useful. A key member of a family of Dark wizards, yet passionately opposed to the Dark Arts - "

"- when it was _other people_ using them!"

"Well, yes; but even if his opposition to Riddle stemmed partly from sheer prejudice against Slytherin he was too potentially valuable to risk antagonizing him, and Albus was sure that if he drove him away, he would switch sides and fall in with the Death Eaters."

"As I did," Severus answered in that dead voice, "but nobody thought that that mattered enough to prevent it." Hermione watched him anxiously. She wanted to sniffle, to rant at him for being so unkind just because he needed something to lash out at and she happened to be in the line of fire; but she knew now, if she had not known it in third year, that Severus's health mattered. Right now he was sounding worse and more irrational than he had done for months, he was fragile, brittle, as she was not, and even if the worst happened and he really had decided to hate her forever more, she would just have to deal with her own feelings later.

"Nobody thought they needed to prevent it" the older woman said irritably. "Not as compared with Sirius, anyway. Of course, we knew you were running with... bad company, but who in Slytherin was not, at that time? And the fact that you were such friends with a Muggle-born, a Gryffindor... Horace was quite sure that you were... sound, and Albus concurred."

"And how bloody wrong they both were. But then neither of them were really seeing me, were they, just a - a tool."

"There's a level on which Dumbledore sees everyone as a tool, including himself, and you know that people-skills were never his long suit. Unlike Black, though, you at least were a tool he valued very highly. He really did, and does, trust you absolutely."

"The more fool him, then." He wished he could sit with his knees drawn up and rest his elbows on them, but he might as well wish for the moon in a bucket. He looked at Draco and Hermione sideways, through his hair, and felt squirmingly guilty for having hurt them when they had put themselves out to care for something as ruined as he felt himself to be. "I didn't meant to suggest that you..." he began awkwardly. "I was - angry, and I had bloody reason to be, but I don't blame you it's - normal, in my experience that people should think that I was expendable. And perhaps right that they should do so," he added under his breath.

"How can you say that?" Hermione exclaimed. She had to be careful how much she said in front of Professor McGonagall, but even so... "You know how much I care; you saw it in my mind" - she cared about him more than life, more than breath, even more than exams and it was bleakly, coldly horrible to remember that he was quite right, there had been a time when she had left him to lie crumpled on the floor unconscious, bleeding and head-injured partly through her own doing, and had felt no more than a vague twitch of concern - and that mainly just over whether she would get into trouble if he died.

"Foolish," he said restlessly. "I was a burden to my parents, a toy to the Marauders - worse than a toy to - to - last year - and a tool to Albus. Not a person. Dirty thing. Reactive meat. Dads was right, never - never worth anything."

"Now you're the one who's being foolish," Minerva said firmly.

"Am I?" he said bleakly, the lines around his mouth drawing in tightly and emphasizing the scars. "I was - good enough to s-suffer for the Order but not to eat with you, nobody cared enough to keep Black from freezing me out because I was never - never a full person, nobody would ever exert themselves on behalf of an ill-formed thing like me I was - 'Oh, it's just Snivellus: it doesn't matter what happens to him, he doesn't have real feelings.'"

"I can't believe I'm saying this," Draco said suddenly, "but you are bearing in mind, aren't you, that Shortarse just tackled a homicidal maniac with a wand and wrestled her to the floor for your sake? I mean, I enjoy a grapple with a girl as much as the next man, but usually not while they're drilling holes in the scenery with the Killing Curse."

Hermione turned, looking surprized, and then smiled at him with a sudden warmth which made all his hormones stand up and salute. His godfather blinked at him. "That's - actually, you've got a point." The bitter lines of self-disgust which had warped his mouth relaxed suddenly and he let himself sag back against the transformed bed-head. "God - Longbottom." He laughed, suddenly, although even to his own ears there were definite overtones of "insane cackling". "So I've proof-positive that at least one bloody person cares enough about me to take a risk for me."

"If our positions were reversed," Draco said severely, greatly daring, "you'd be telling me to cut the self-pity."

"I would, wouldn't I? But then that's just another proof that I'm so bloody - feeble - "

"_Don't_ start that again," Hermione snapped in sudden irritation, and the corners of Severus's mouth twitched.

"Yes miss." He sighed, moving his head restlessly. "It's hard to be rational or, or properly objective when I'm scared quite literally sick," he said painfully; "but how can I ever be - anything other than afraid, all the bloody time? Anything other than - fucking terrified, knowing that one of the people who was _guarding_ me was poised to - to take me back to _that_?"

It was, in truth, a terrifying thought for all of them, but Hermione patted his hand gently. "It's - horrible but it does show that, well, that we're doing a good job looking after you, doesn't it? I mean, she was hovering around for five months looking for a chance to get at you and she didn't get one, did she? because there were always other guards, other people with you." Out of the corner of her eye she could see Professor McGonagall nodding in agreement.

"That's true," he replied; "it shows that the - the redundancy in the system works. But how can I ever know - whom to trust?"

"Well, you can trust me," she answered with the ghost of a grin. "You've seen inside my head, and having tried to teach me Occlumency you _know_ I'm not good enough to lie to you."

"This is, in fact, perfectly true. But - oh, God..."

"You're over-tired, Severus," Minerva said gently. "You should rest, now." She looked at the two teenagers, dismissing them from service - dismissing them kindly enough, but still dismissing them, even though strictly speaking the eight to midnight slot belonged to Draco today. "You two should be getting back to your dorms, especially with NEWTs only two months away. I'll stay with him until Miss Lovegood takes over."

Severus felt a pang of regret at seeing Hermione leave, it might have been nice, comforting, to spend the night in her arms but it was all so complicated anyway, he didn't know whether he was still angry with her for her dismissive callousness towards him in third year or guilty about his own callousness in reminding her of it, and besides -

"Need a mother to put me to bed," he said sleepily. "Never really had one before - you'll do." Minerva snorted, not sure whether to be flattered or offended. "Jus' - just wish Albus was here to complete the set." He was drowsily aware that before he was injured, before Albus's sudden access of sentimentality about his ruined carcass, the Headmaster had made a very doubtful father-substitute - but then he was used to the idea of a father as a cold and scornful task-master, and at least Albus, even in his earlier incarnation, had never actually beaten him and had praised him when he did well.

"The Headmaster is still otherwise engaged," a literally sepulchral voice said, and Severus snapped awake to see the Bloody Baron drifting through the wall next to the fireplace, his eyes staring and blank.

"Glentrool," Severus replied politely, giving the Baron the title of his barony.

The Baron inclined his head. "Son of my house, I will stand as a father tae ye if one is needed."

"Er - thank you," the younger and still-living man replied rather uncertainly. The Baron had never been a soothing presence, although he suspected him of hamming the Gothic-horror factor up for effect - and he supposed that that was something they had shared, when he had still been up to prowling and purring. He probably had more in common with the old ghost, hovering there with the marks of his own torture-death still upon him, than he had with Albus - and certainly far more than he had ever had with his genetic father.

"The Grey Lady told me whit occurred this evening" the Baron said, sound less formal: "fair distressed she was that one of her own house could behave so cruelly, and I wis no less so: but at least the Slytherin chit acted frae loyalty to a cause, however ill-chosen, and not jist tae prove she wisnae her ain sister."

"She told the truth, though, didn't she?" Severus said wearily. "People keep telling me, telling me, over and over that I am still human, that I never ceased to be human but that's just a comforting lie told to a child, isn't it? I've _seen_ myself, both in my own memory and in H- Miss Granger's - a mouldering, maggoty corpse, mindless and crying - "

"You were still aware, and suffering," the Baron said remotely: "as I was. She still had nae cause tae treat you as if yir suffering didn't matter."

"You never - lost yourself as I did, Glentrool, did you? - you were never - reduced to this filthy, violated, grotesque - " Absently, without realizing he was doing it, he began to claw at his own skin again.

"I wis fortunate enough not tae get the chance," Glentrool replied candidly, "seeing my heart gave out after eight days. I wouldna hae kept my sanity four weeks, let alone four months."

"You were lucky not to have to learn your own - snivelling weakness, to be whittled down to this - stump of a thing..." He raked his nails across his ribs, raising welts through the fine linen of the shirt.

"Dinnae be so daft, man," Minerva said firmly, catching his hand and holding it still. "You don't think any less of me when I have four paws and a tail, do you?"

"But you're still - beautiful, when you're a cat not craven and, and ugly and misshapen."

"Man," his colleague and former teacher replied with a wry grin, "I've seen Horace Slughorn turn into an armchair: I've even sat on him. Why would I care what shape you were? You could never be other than - yourself, whatever form you were wearing."

Intrigued, Severus pulled up short in his litany of self-loathing. "What happened, when you sat on Horace?"

Minerva grimaced primly. "I'd rather not say."

"Oh, come on - play fair. Tell."

"If you must know - he pinched my arse, and I slapped him."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"You know, don't you," Minerva said thoughtfully, "that the Grey Lady has put it about that you murdered her in a fit of jealousy, because she had rejected your - your suit, and then killed yourself out of remorse?"

"Oh aye," the Baron replied, grinning a grin which revealed a mouthful of irregular tombstone teeth which made Severus's look almost pretty. "She disnae like people to know that _I_ dumped _her_. Let alane that she wis sae pish-poor at Herbology that she died of eating a dodgy mushroom."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Minerva McGonagall rubbed tiredly at her eyes, which were red and looked as if she had been crying. "I know he does need to think about what was done to him, to work his way through it - but I can't bear it when he won't stop blaming himself, tearing at himself - "

"I know," Hermione said glumly, toying with the remains of what she supposed qualified as a Working Breakfast in the Deputy Headmistress's office. At least she had free study after lunch, so she would be able to spend the afternoon with Severus without missing any classes. "When he sinks too far into one of his bouts of depression and self-loathing, nothing I do seems to bring him out of it," (not even kissing, she added, in the privacy of her own head), "and I _hate_ not being able to help him." She realized that Neville was looking simultaneously smug and shifty. "What?"

"Well, eh, when he gets stuck on how dirty he is I generally just let Trevor 'escape' - I figured freaking out because there's a loose toad in his bed was healthier than freaking out about being raped. Of course, I can't do it _every_ time or he'd work it out and shout at me." As they stared at him he ducked his head and smiled. "Contrary to popular gossip, there are very few flies on me. If there were, Trevor would have eaten them."

((_The others, excepting Dumbledore, would have worried too much about whether it was right to manipulate the man, even for his own good; but Neville had the patient knowledge of Things Which Needed to be Done. Much later, Snape would say:_

_"I did work out what you were doing with that toad, you know."_

_"Er, yes... Are you angry with me?"_

_"Not really - I thought it showed an intelligent and resourceful use of the materials to hand. And it worked, which was the main thing."_

_"Eh, well, I know from experience that it's impossible to concentrate on feeling depressed when something with cold, slimy feet is scrambling in through the neck of your nightshirt."_

_"And the warts - don't forget the warts, Longbottom."_

_"I've always thought Trevor has particularly good warts."_))

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Severus gasped and twisted, tears of terror and misery leaking out from his closed eyes. The dream closed around him like the walls of the cell, cold, horrible - the stone space stank of blood and other fluids, it reeked of pain - their hands reached out for him, grabbing, lascivious, there were knives flashing in their hands and jagged laughter; but before they could seize him, before he could begin to scream, the nightmare scene began to peel away like a thin skin and breaking through behind it was warmth and green life, dazzlingly bright, and the overwhelmingly heavy, damp, marzipan scent of the greenhouse, welcoming him in to take root and grow in the sun's heat...

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I dreamed - "

"What did you dream?"

He lay on his back, gazing up at the morning sunlight glinting through the coloured glass shards of the mobile as it turned slowly in the slight draught from the window, the feathers and shells and fragments of sun-dried driftwood bobbing slightly in the breeze and the chimes ringing softly at the edge of hearing. "I dreamed that I was alive - properly alive, and growing, like the flowers in the greenhouse. I dreamed that it would be all right."

Lovegood's eccentric, slightly pop-eyed face appeared between him and the mobile, smiling down at him, her ash-fair hair crackling with light. "Annihilating all that's made," she said, with a kind of solemn cheerfulness, "To a green thought in a green shade."

"Yes." His mouth quirked up at the corners. "The oddest part was when Longbottom began watering me with beer, and I complained because it wasn't a real ale, but only Tetley's."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Come in," he said warily, and the door opened to reveal Potter, of all people.

"I, ah - " the boy said, smiling nervously at Snape and then at Draco, "I just wanted you to know that I checked and your cowslip wine is still there and it, uh, seems to be OK."

"How did it taste?" Snape asked smoothly.

"Quite nice, sort of flowery and - refreshing..." He blushed and looked down, scuffling his shoe against the mat. "I, uh, had to make sure it hadn't gone off, or anything..."

Snape narrowed his eyes. "Oh, of course you did..." He smirked faintly, and Draco sniggered. "You should sleep like a baby tonight, or like a log, whichever you consider more - appropriate."

"It's a sedative? Is that why you...?"

"Yes." He sighed and made a Herculean effort to talk to the boy normally and not keep poking at him, as tempting as that was. "It makes a good and far less addictive alternative to Dreamless Sleep, so you'll understand that if you could bring it down to me at some point that would be much appreciated."

"Oh, I'll get it for you now," Harry said cheerfully. "I know that cupboard: Hagrid used to, uh - "

"Keep an enormous, man-eating spider in it?"

"Yeah... well, I dunno if Aragog ever _actually_ ate anybody, but - yeah." He scuffed his shoe again, hesitating, his hand on the doorknob. "Sir?"

"Yes Potter, what is it?"

"If you - if you meant what you said, about teaching me how to make wine I - I think I'd like that."

Severus rolled his eyes. "I should have known it would take the prospect of being able to brew your own booze to get you interested in Potions, Potter."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I'm sorry," he muttered. "It wasn't fair of me to attack you like that."

"No it - " She took a deep breath, looking down at her own hands as if they were suddenly fascinating. "You were quite right, in third year I - I didn't know you, and I didn't really care much what happened to you, and I should have done, because everybody should care about everybody, really, and because you were trying to protect us, even if - "

"Even if I'd got hold of the wrong end of the stick," he said wryly, "and was hanging on to it with pig-headed determination."

"Erm, yes. But - but even though you were right about me in third year you were wrong about me _now_, because I, I care about you more than anything, I think. I really do." She gazed at him, brown-eyed and earnest, and he nodded slowly.

"I do... know that. As strange as it still seems to me. And I - I don't know about 'more than anything', because I have... obligations. To do with the war. But that I do - care... Well, you shouldn't doubt it." It probably deserved some sort of booby-prize, he thought, for the most inept declaration of love ever made, but Hermione was gazing at him as soppily as if he were some sort of smooth-tongued Don Juan.

"You're so sweet when you're tongue-tied," she said with a grin, and he realised with a sudden rush of gratitude and relief that he didn't have to be Don Juan: it really did seem to be enough to be himself, however strange that might seem.

"I refuse to be considered 'sweet'," he grumbled, and then reached out very delicately and ran his finger along the fine line of her jaw, and thence down onto her shoulder. "Hermione would you - undress for me, I mean - really undress and, and help me to?"

"Severus? Yes, of course I will, but - " Although they had by now spent a great deal of time lying skin to skin they had always kept at least some clothes on, for the sake of his raw nerves. The idea of stripping off completely was an official Big Step which made her pulse flutter with nerves of her own. "Are you sure? Why now?"

He sighed and let himself slide down onto his back on the bed, gazing up at her. The knowledge that he had been in such danger with Greengrass at the door - Merlin, she had even been one of the ones who had returned early after Christmas to guard him! - all the time that he had thought himself comparatively safe was beyond frightening, it made the memory of pain so much more immediate that he ought to have shied away from all physical contact as if it burned him, now as then. But, God help him, he didn't want to die or be dragged back into that merciless hell without having had at least some sort of pleasurable sexual contact, something that was his, and the same recklessness which had propelled him out of his rooms and up the stairs impelled him, now, to seize what happiness he could - to go on, instead of falling back.

"Because I could have died yesterday," he said with a sigh, "and I realized I didn't want to die without seeing you naked and I don't mean that nearly as crudely as it sounds, I hope you realize, because right now seeing you naked seems like one of those obligatory wonders a man has to experience at least once in his life, like listening to Mozart or watching a really good sunset..."

"Oh, I do," she said, beaming. "Realize, I mean." Fluid and suddenly unselfconscious, she began to shuck off layers of clothing, her fingers moving deftly from button to button.

"I want to see you," he said candidly, watching her shoulders, her breasts appear from their shrouds of cloth like the sun emerging from behind clouds, "and I want to be seen. Or rather, I don't - the mere idea scares me shitless, quite frankly - but I want to reassure myself that I'm wrong to be scared and that you won't - you won't laugh at me. Or recoil from me," he added quietly.

"I won't laugh at you," she said gently, moving her hands to the collar of his shirt and beginning to undo it. His breath caught in his throat and she touched his cheek gently before she began to draw the linen down over his shoulders. Her touch was tender rather than erotic, but even so he jumped and shuddered when her careful hands laid bare what he awkwardly thought of as "down there".

When he was stripped, Hermione sat on the bed with her feet tucked up and her chin in her hands, a little _gamine_ with her hair falling loosely over her slightly freckled shoulders, and contemplated him solemnly, trying not to glance too obviously at his groin. It wasn't as if it was the first time she'd seen a naked man in the flesh, after all, she must have glimpsed her father or one of the boys coming out of the shower oh, easily three or four times, for about half a second at a time...

"Well?" Severus said, with a sort of grim levity; "Do I look as grotesque as I feel?"

"It's..." She frowned, trying to put it into words, her eyes straying to the scarred crater where his left leg should be. "The injuries are grotesque, but you're not, if that makes sense. Like looking at some wonderful Greek statue that's been broken - you can still see that it's wonderful, even though..."

"Even though I've never born the remotest resemblance to a Greek god."

"That wasn't what I was going to say, but - well, yes. For one thing, Greek statues tend to have very small..." She blushed, and his scarred face crinkled momentarily into a rather smug smirk. "Not that I was looking, or anything. But you're very... nicely made, elegant, better than a Greek statue I think, and you still are. The injuries have made you into... into two-thirds of a lovely thing, if you see what I mean, rather than into an only two-thirds lovely thing."

"I've never considered myself to be remotely lovely," he snapped in sudden bitterness, and she smiled at him.

"Opinions vary, but you have nice bones, and I thought we'd agreed that if I'd wanted a pretty-boy I could have gone out and caught one." She unfurled herself to lie down beside him, on top of the covers where he could still see her in all her undeniable glory. He for his part hitched the blankets up surreptitiously to mid thigh, to make the loss of limb less painfully obvious, rolled over into her embrace and settled to the serious business of kissing her.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

The afternoon drifted past them slowly, golden and sweet, punctuated by occasional glasses of cowslip wine which kept them both pleasantly relaxed and eased the biting bruises of memory. Kissing her like this, mother-naked and with the warm breeze blowing across his skin, was having powerful effects further south and he had no desire, for once, to retreat to the seclusion of the shower and deal with it on his own. And he ought to have been afraid: on one level he was, he was terrified; in his mind, if no longer in his body, he could still feel the viciously deep, burning internal ache which had been a constant companion through four months of miserable abuse - a reminder that his flesh and his sexuality was no longer his to own but other people's, to enjoy as they pleased, and the knowledge of it made him shuddery and sick to his stomach.

But Hermione was warm and real and alive and here, she wanted him to want her, _cared_ whether he wanted her - he knew it, he couldn't doubt it, it was right there in the forefront of her mind, making love to Hermione would be an expression of life and movement and freedom, of joy even, not of oppression and he couldn't but respond and he felt her feel it - as she felt his erection push against her thigh she gave a pleased little wriggle which jolted him to his bones and then she flamed abruptly scarlet, all over, until he thought he would strangle with desire, although the sight of her pink-faced and pink-other-thinged with embarrassment also filled him with a wild urge to laugh.

"Look at me," he said gravely, trying not to grin as she blushed even harder, and tilted her chin up with his finger. "Hermione. Would you - do you wish to take this further? I mean - here and now and - I don't mean actually, ah, 'going all the way' as we used to say when I was your age" - he cringed internally and wished he hadn't reminded himself of quite how long ago that had been - "but something more intimate and, um... stimulating," he finished in a tiny mumble, flushing even more scarlet than she was, but the words "heavy petting" sounded so crass there was no way he would ever be able to get his tongue around them, even when he was dizzily imagining getting it around other things.

Hermione blushed again, her body still pressed hard against his in places which made his Adam's apple bob convulsively. "I - yes," she said in a small voice. On one level the prospect was so daunting it made her giddy and light-headed with terror; on another, the feel of him, the knowledge that she was making him so aroused, made her sweat with desire. "Yes, I want to go on."

"You're shaking," Severus said gently. "Are you so afraid? You don't have to if you - "

"No!" she interrupted him, shaking her head, although she could hardly trust herself to speak "Not - not frightened." She placed her small hand flat against his chest, over his heart. "You're shaking too."

"Sit up, then," he said hoarsely. To sit up himself he had to roll away from her in order to use his right hand to push himself up from the mattress, and then swivel back to face her on the precarious fulcrum of his one remaining thigh - but he had excellent balance. He braced himself with his hand against the bed and looked at her, wonderingly - sitting back on her own heels in a kneeling position, hands on thighs and back straight as if preparing for some kind of martial art, her eyes enormous and solemn and slightly apprehensive.

"Well..." he began at the same time that she said "Shall we...?" They smirked at each other fleetingly, each as nervous as the other, and then Severus looked aside, letting his hair fall across his face. Hermione put her hand up and smoothed the heavy, lank strands back behind his ear so that she could see his expression, and he turned his head and kissed the inside of her wrist, as softly as a feather.

They stared at each other for a moment - Hermione rather obviously struggling with the urge to look down - and then Severus exclaimed under his breath, leaned into her willing embrace and kissed her deep and hard, his tongue sliding against hers until he could feel the pulse in his groin leap like a deer in anticipation. "You're quite certain that you really do want to do this?" he asked, breaking away from the kiss and breathing rather fast.

Hermione nodded tightly. "You said it yourself" she replied, equally breathlessly. "There are some areas in which there's no real substitute for hands-on experience."

"I should be glad I do still have one hand that's my very own" he replied smoothly, and commenced trailing that hand lightly and sensually across her skin from her jaw-line down to her breasts, her flanks, her buttocks, sometimes using his fingertips and sometimes the backs of his fingers and his knuckles - so obviously admiring her shape with his touch that by the time those long fingers came to rest on the gentle curve of her stomach Hermione was shivering as if she was bone-cold, although in truth she felt blazing hot. "Filius's prosthesis is starting to feel almost natural but I'd still far rather use real flesh to touch - flesh" he murmured, caught on the edge of a kind of cheerful hysteria as he slid those long fingers further down and started to do things which made her squirm and gasp.

Hermione bit her lip, trying to retain some shreds of concentration, and stroked her own hands down his chest and stomach, slowly, letting him know what she was doing before she did it. She had spent so much time reading the books and imagining what it would feel like to touch her partner's erection, in order not to embarrass herself by appearing awkward and unskilled, that the action came easily to her - even with him doing his very best to distract her, so that she writhed involuntarily under his touch and could hardly hold still for a second. But she still drew a shaky breath when she felt how warm and solid and real he was against her palms - he was right, there were some things for which only hands-on experience would do - and a longer one when she felt the knots of scarring where she knew no scarring should be.

He was breathing hard and his pupils were dilated with desire, but when he felt her snatch her hands back in shock he stopped what he was doing and stared at her dazedly. "If you don't want to continue - "

"It's not that, you're - I don't want you to stop" she admitted, feeling a rather embarrassing urge to grind herself against his hand in frustration. "And I don't - I'm not afraid to touch you, it's just - oh, love, so many scars."

He looked away from her, shivering. "When they - if I was - if I was still, still up after they'd - finished it amused them to whip or burn me um, between the legs especially after they'd taken one of my legs off, it made it easier to - and it amused them that they could still make me throw a fit and go into convulsions - that way, even when I was so exhausted that even the Cruciatus no longer got much of a response." He forced the memory away, making a conscious effort to sound brisk and _blasé_. "But Adrian assures me that everything should still work, if I'm a bit - careful, although he put it rather more bluntly than that."

"He would." She put her left hand up to touch his cheek and turn his face back towards her. "Kiss me" she said firmly. He was so much taller, even when they were both sitting, and she expected him to bend down to her level - but he grinned like a wolf and raised her up onto her knees with an intimate grip which caused her to gasp and make a startled "Mmp!" sound. As his long mouth came down forcefully over hers she ran the other hand lightly down the scarred and slightly furry midline of his stomach again, determined to do better this time.

* * *

**Author's note:**

Soor Plooms (sour plums) are a very sharp and violently green lemon-and-lime-flavoured Scottish boiled sweet.

"The older man bore against that tenuous anchor" - to "bore against" something is to push hard against it with the intention of forcing a way through but it can, as here, also be the past tense of "bear against". To "bear against" something can mean to attack it with force, as when bringing cannon to bear against an enemy emplacement, but it can also just mean to press firmly against something so that it "bears you" - that is, takes part of your weight - and that is the sense in which it is used here. It just sounds better than "leaned heavily against", and has the advantage of implying that the anchor of Draco's contact is metaphorically holding Snape up.

I know I've made Cormac McLaggen have started on his sex-life a little young, but I wanted Tonks to know a bit about his sexual history. By the summer before the start of Harry's fifth year Tonks had been an Auror for a year and we know Auror training takes three years, so she must have left school just before Harry started, even if she went straight from NEWTs into Auror training. And Cormac is only a year above Harry, so he and Tonks can only have overlapped by a year: he was in first year when Tonks was in seventh. A friend of mine did actually develop both a full beard and a marked interest in girls by the time he was thirteen, so I'm assuming that Cormac was a similarly early starter, and that he was one of the older students in his year and was turned twelve and a half at the point Tonks is thinking of.

Regarding Snape's comment that Sirius was only opposed to the Dark Arts if it was other people who were using them, in PoA Snape said that the Marauder's Map was full of Dark magic - and he may well have been right. It certainly qualifies as a thing which appears to be able to think for itself (it talks, interactively), and yet you can't see where it keeps its brain.

In GoF, as part of the memory of Karkaroff's trial which Harry sees in the Pensieve, Dumbledore tells the court that "Severus Snape was indeed a Death Eater. However, he rejoined our side before Lord Voldemort's downfall"; and at the end of HBP when Dumbledore tells Harry about Snape's remorse over giving Voldemort the prophecy he says "I believe it to be the greatest regret of his life and the reason that he returned -" This emphasis on returning, on rejoining the anti-Voldemort faction, suggests that Snape may have been working for Dumbledore/the Order before he joined the Death Eaters - or, at the very least, that Dumbledore had already pegged him as being naturally of the light party and a potential recruit.

There is a popular idea in fanon that Albus always favoured the Marauders over Severus in all things. But although Albus speaks quite well of James he doesn't seem exactly devastated by his death, and he does tell Harry in first year that James was to Snape as Draco is to Harry. His praise of James seems to be mainly that James wouldn't kill an unarmed man who was grovelling for mercy at his feet - a thing which should really go without saying for any civilized person although not, apparently, for Sirius and Remus.

He never speaks of Remus at all, except to tell Snape he doesn't believe the man to be in league with Sirius (about which he is correct), and the one time we see them interact Remus appears deeply uncomfortable. Because Dumbledore gave Remus the DADA post which Snape wanted we are encouraged, in PoA, to think that Albus favours Remus over Snape: but now that we know that the two previous incumbents had been left dead or with permanent brain-damage because the post was actually cursed, and that Albus knew this, it becomes apparent that far from favouring Remus at Snape's expense, Albus was actually protecting Snape at Remus's expense.

As for Sirius, Dumbledore made decisions about Harry's future as soon as the Potters were dead, without consulting Sirius at all; he never seems to have doubted his guilt while he was in Azkaban; he keeps him confined to Grimmauld Place and doesn't permit him to make his own choices; he again makes decisions about Harry's future and sets up a private meeting between Snape and Sirius's godson, in Sirius's house, from which Sirius is pointedly excluded and without even telling him in advance; and he can scarcely find a single good word to say about the man and criticizes him openly, even when he is less than an hour dead. As with James, Sirius's death appears to cause him no more than mild sadness - and that mainly for its effect on Harry.

He speaks of Snape, on the other hand, with considerable affection and kindness, and appears to trust him absolutely. It's true that he doesn't seem able to make up his mind, sometimes, whether to treat Snape as a colleague or a child but Snape is almost eighjty years younger than him, and Albus explicitly admitted, to Tom Riddle, that he couldn't help falling back into seeing his adult former pupils as still children.

The idea that Albus always favoured Gryffindors above Slytherins became entrenched in fanon from the outset because of the rather disgraceful way he cheated Slytherin out of the House Cup at the end of the first book. But Albus later explicitly stated that he did so to please Harry, specifically, not Gryffindor in general: and the fact that previously Slytherin had won the House Cup for six years solid hardly supports the idea that the Headmaster was strongly biased against them. His bias in canon is for Harry personally, not for Gryffindor or against Slytherin, and yet Snape is one of the few subjects he will deny or defy Harry about. Indeed, a good case could be made for saying that his affection for young Severus had been nearly as strong as his affection for Harry, and his apparent soft spot for James came about precisely because James had saved Severus for him.

The only time Albus really seems prejudiced against Slytherins is when he praises Harry for having chosen to be in Gryffindor, against the Sorting Hat's advice; but the Hat had pegged Harry as a Slytherin because he smelt of Tom Riddle, and the ambition which it thought it saw in him and which suited him to Slytherin was the echo of Tom's lust for power rather than a simple desire to do well. So it may well be that what Albus is really praising is the fact that Harry chose not to be like Tom.

As it is used here, "redundancy" means duplication of effort, as applied to a backup system. Having at least two guards at Snape's door and one person with him at all times may seem like overkill but the backup system, the redundancy, worked, because it meant that when one of the guards turned out to be a rotten apple there were still two people to protect him from her.

The Bloody Baron must be Baron _of_ somewhere. I have given him the name of a village in Galloway, since I have a theory, too long and complicated to explain here but mainly having to do with the weather and the very English-sounding name Hogsmeade, that Hogwarts is in the Galloway Hills rather than the Highlands.

"Annihilating all that's made / To a green thought in a green shade" - from the poem _The Garden_ by Andrew Marvell.

A _gamine_ was originally a female street-urchin, a homeless child; but it has a secondary meaning of a young woman who looks mischievous and rather boyish in a charming way.

Readers may also be interested in an essay called _But Snape is just nasty, right?_ which you can find on my website at **w w w . whitehound . co . uk / Fanfic / **(just take out the spaces). A writer called **seomensnowlocke** posted (on ffn, which is really against the rules) an essay called _Why Snape Does What He Does _which irritated me so much that I felt impelled to write a complete rebuttal, explaining the reasons behind Snape's sometimes difficult behaviour, and this essay was the result.

This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_, to show that Severus wasn't completely friendless as a child, and that Albus made a remote, borderline-abusive father-figure before Severus was injured. The Daphne/Padma incident now has added hair-pulling, just because one of our reviewers asked for it, and the Baron explains why the Grey Lady's version of his death, as given in _Deathly Hallows_, differs from ours.


	21. Revision Table

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**REVISION TABLE**

Apologies to readers who are waiting eagerly for a new chapter, because this isn't it. What this is, is a summary of the changes which have been made to _Lost and Found_ in order to bring it into line with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_ - although obviously it remains AU from the canon timeline, branching off immediately after the fight in the Ministry of Magic at the end of OotP.

The re-edits were uploaded on 21st August 2007 (except "rich handsome bachelor" which was added later), so anybody who began reading this story after that date has already read the edited version, and should skip to the next chapter. The changes are, for the most part, minor, which is why I have presented them in this summary form, so readers don't have to re-read the story in its entirety just to find out what's different (unless they really want to, of course).

I have not bothered to note down tiny changes such as capitalizing "Flobberworm", but all changes which affect the meaning of the story are listed here. The main difficulties we had were that we already had our own, completely different version of the Bloody Baron (which we have fudged over simply by assuming that the Grey Lady was lying), and that our version of Albus is much nicer than Rowling's turned out to be. But given his shock and grief over Ariana we felt it was not unreasonable that the sight of Snape's appalling injuries might shake him enough to make him a bit more caring, and the story has been amended to show that this represents a shift in his relationship with Severus, rather than just a continuation of it.

With reference to the similar edits to **whitehound**'s solo stories _Mood Music_ and _Sons of Prophecy_, I know some readers expressed doubts about whether it was right to revise these stories. Our reasons for doing so are two-fold: just as, aside from the artistic pleasure of telling a story, our reasons for writing them are two-fold.

Firstly, we wanted to examine canon and look at why certain characters, especially Snape, behave as they do. This can only work if the story is compatible with canon: it's no good saying "Harry does this because" and then presenting a reason which has been totally canon-shafted. Secondly, we wanted to show Snape getting the love and care which he is so signally denied in the books. And the Snape revealed in _Deathly Hallows_ is even more in need of a bit of t.l.c. than had already been apparent.

Having completed these revisions, I now have to re-edit a couple of essays. After that, normal updates will be resumed.

* * *

**_LOST AND FOUND_**

* * *

**PROLOGUE**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional paragraph):_** In addition, when Dumbledore was injured by the cursed Peverell ring he called Snape to assist him immediately, instead of delaying as we are shown that he did (in Snape's memories in _Deathly Hallows_), so the curse has been stabilized. He has been left with a permanently maimed hand but the curse is not actually progressing.

* * *

**THE STORY SO FAR**

No changes.

* * *

**1: A DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** the Headmaster remained oblivious, gazing at his friend's agonized, ruined face

**_New:_** the Headmaster remained oblivious, gazing at the younger man's agonized, ruined face

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** She saw Professor Dumbledore, shorn of all dignity and all mirth, holding his friend's shoulders,

**_New:_** She saw Professor Dumbledore, shorn of all dignity and all mirth, holding his colleague's shoulders,

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been slightly edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to reduce the degree to which Dumbledore thinks of Snape as having been his friend prior to his disappearance.

* * *

**2: EMERGENCY WARD 93/4**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "There's no way I'm going to get all this lot through the fireplace, Albus"

**_New:_** "There's no way I'm going to get all this lot through the fireplace, Dumbledore"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** now that his friend was no longer in such overwhelming agony

**_New:_** now that Snape was no longer in such overwhelming agony

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Unfortunately, yes" Dumbledore said sadly, performing the cleansing spell for his friend.

**_New:_** "Unfortunately, yes" Dumbledore said sadly, performing the cleansing spell with a tenderness which suggested that the younger man might be more to him than just a colleague in trouble.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** Dumbledore, trying to monitor his friend's mind with a light touch,

**_New:_** Dumbledore, trying to monitor his patient's mind with a light touch,

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been slightly edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to reduce the degree to which Dumbledore thinks of Snape as having been his friend prior to his disappearance.

* * *

**3: SPEAKING IN TONGUES**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "we will have to tell the students that you, and I, and Albus are all indisposed."

**_New:_** "we will have to tell the students that you, and I, and the Headmaster are all indisposed."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** Albus had been obliging enough to explain the effects of something called Cruciatus

**_New:_** Dumbledore had been obliging enough to explain the effects of something called Cruciatus

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** anything which might suggest that his friend might still have a rational mind,

**_New:_** anything which might suggest that Snape might still have a rational mind,

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional second paragraph):_** This is complicated by the fact that in _Deathly Hallows_ the Weasleys think that they would have been able to regrow George's severed ear, were it not for some special quality in the curse that severed it. It is possible that Moody's leg was severed by just such a curse, and that Voldemort could have regrown Peter a hand of flesh but chose not to. Yet Professor Kettleburn's limbs were surely just torn off by some creature. Obviously there are circumstances under which missing limbs cannot be regrown - or perhaps they never can be, and George's ear could have been regrown only because an ear is quite a simple thing without bones, tendons or muscles.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been slightly edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to reduce the degree to which Dumbledore thinks of Snape as having been his friend prior to his disappearance, and to show people tending to think of him more as "Dumbledore" than as "Albus".

* * *

**4: WAKING DREAMS**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** Albus, with his irritating ability to look on the bright side,

**_New:_** Dumbledore, with his irritating ability to look on the bright side,

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** Albus had no desire to commit another sort of rape by forcing his friend's mind.

**_New:_** Albus had no desire to commit another sort of rape by forcing the victim's mind.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** He gestured wordlessly at his friend's terrible injuries

**_New:_** He gestured wordlessly at Snape's terrible injuries

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** he would have his prickly, over-sensitive, painfully dignified friend Severus

**_New:_** they would have the old prickly, over-sensitive, painfully dignified Severus

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "a false you and a false Albus"

**_New:_** "a false you and a false Dumbledore"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been slightly edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to reduce the degree to which Dumbledore thinks of Snape as having been his friend prior to his disappearance, and to show people tending to think of him more as "Dumbledore" than as "Albus".

* * *

**5: STONE WALLS DO NOT A PRISON MAKE**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "...boy never stops growing. I worry about him, Albus"

**_New:_** "...boy never stops growing. I worry about him, Dumbledore"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** she could see that Albus was right

**_New:_** she could see that Dumbledore was right

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** she and Albus were splitting Potions classes between them

**_New:_** she and Dumbledore were splitting Potions classes between them

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** no worse than he was with Albus _et al_.

**_New:_** no worse than he was with Dumbledore _et al_.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Oh - oh God, Albus, Lucius will want him to take the Mark! You have to help him, Albus!"

"If I can, I will. For all his faults, I do not believe Lucius would deliberately endanger him. Shh, now, don't distress yourself. The best thing you can do for any of your Slytherins right now is to rest and grow stronger. Will you eat a little?"

"Very well, Albus. If you insist." But when he had tasted it he turned his face away and said sourly "What is this slop?"

**_New:_** "Oh - oh God, Lucius will want him to take the Mark! You have to help him, Dumbled'dore!" His tongue stumbled over the multiple consonants in his weariness and his weakness, and the older man clicked his own tongue in irritation.

"Call me Albus, child, if you prefer - it's easier to say. If I can help Draco, I will. For all his faults, I do not believe Lucius would deliberately endanger him. Shh, now, don't distress yourself. The best thing you can do for any of your Slytherins right now is to rest and grow stronger. Will you eat a little?"

"Very well, D-Dumbledore. Albus. If you _insist_."

"I do - on both counts."

"Feels strange..." the young man murmured drowsily. "Y'r Headmaster..."

"But I hope that I am also your friend - or, if I have not always been so in the past, then I do intend to be in the future."

"Pity?" the other man jibed, his mouth twisting. "I suppose pity is all I'm bloody worth."

"Say rather that coming so close to losing you has made me realize the value of what I would have lost and the, the courage you showed in a r?e which I at least partially forced on you. None of which alters the fact that you need to eat."

"Very well - Albus. If you insist." But when he had tasted it he turned his face away and said sourly "What is this slop?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "You're not a burden," his friend and sometime employer replied firmly, "and you may have anything you want that's within our power to give." And thought, Please don't ask me to kill somebody for you, although if it was one of his friend's torturers he'd be sorely tempted to do it.

**_New:_** "You're not a burden," his new-found friend and sometime employer replied firmly, "and you may have anything you want that's within our power to give." And thought, Please don't ask me to kill somebody for you, although if it was one of this frail, ruined young man's torturers he'd be sorely tempted to do it.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional three paragraphs):_** Although we are re-editing this story to make it compatible with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, we have invested too much in our version of the Bloody Baron to change him now. For present purposes I am assuming, therefore, that the Grey Lady is a fantasist who is lying when she says that the Baron was her rejected suitor who killed both her and himself. It's a fudge, OK - but no worse than some of JKR's own fudges.

An even more major canon problem is that our version of Albus Dumbledore is very much kinder and warmer than the one we see in _Deathly Hallows_. However, given that he spent his teens regarding his sister as a burden and then a century racked with guilt over her death, it seems possible that he would be capable of guilt and grief over Severus's injuries when he was actually hit over the head with the reality of his suffering - and guilt and grief might grow into real affection. So I think our version of Albus in this story could be canon compatible, even though he's stretching it a bit.

This chapter has been slightly re-edited to reduce the degree to which Dumbledore thinks of Snape as having been his friend prior to his disappearance, and to show him moving towards real friendship now, and encouraging Severus to call him "Albus" rather than "Dumbledore".

* * *

**6: HOLDING ON**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "Albus, please - don't shame me with the rubbish I talk when I'm - not concentrating."

**_New:_** "Dumbledore - Albus - please: don't shame me with the rubbish I talk when I'm - not concentrating."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I ask honesty of my friend."

**_New:_** "I ask honesty of a friend."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "That was why - why you asked Albus to cover the snakes?"

**_New:_** "That was why - why you asked Dumbledore to cover the snakes?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been slightly edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to show Snape getting used to the idea of saying "Albus", rather than "Dumbledore" as was formerly his habit.

* * *

**7: SLEEPTALKING**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** He shuddered, turning his face towards the older man's chest, his snowy beard. "He took everything else from me: after they had - hurt me enough I couldn't hold my barriers any more, not my body and not my mind, but He - He can't comprehend love, He doesn't have the wiring for it, so He'll believe any foolishness of those who do. He - He wanted it to be true, so that He could sneer at the thing He can't have, can't feel so I - I think I did manage to deceive Him, in that at least. And I knew that - that He would probably want to taunt you with the details of what He'd done to me and if it included _that_, Lupin here would know that it was false, that I had still lied to Him and that I hadn't - hadn't betrayed you completely."

"I don't see that you betrayed me at all - not that I'd be worrying about it if you did, the circumstances being what they are."

"I should - should have found some way to keep Him out, instead of which He - He stripped my mind of information about the Order. Albus I - "

"Hush, now - if you still managed to mislead Tom at all, you were doing much better than one could reasonably expect. You deserve a medal - literally - and I mean to see that you get one."

"A medal! - just because I managed to keep one corner of my mind clear while I was - mewling for mercy and spilling every secret I possessed."

**_New:_** He shuddered, turning his face towards the older man's chest, his snowy beard: though it still seemed strange to him, to meet kindness where he had expected scorn, from a man who had been so harsh and unyielding over his transgressions in the past - the great Albus Dumbledore, whose avuncular twinkle had hidden an iron heart. As a youth he had cringed before the old man's wrath and stammered for forgiveness; as a man, fire-hardened, he had met it with equal harshness of his own. "He took everything else from me: after they had - hurt me enough I couldn't hold my barriers any more, not my body and not my mind, but He - He can't comprehend love, He doesn't have the wiring for it, so He'll believe any foolishness of those who do. He - He wanted it to be true, so that He could sneer at the thing He can't have, can't feel so I - I think I did manage to deceive Him, in that at least. And I knew that - that He would probably want to taunt you with the details of what He'd done to me and if it included _that_, Lupin here would know that it was false, that I had still lied to Him and that I hadn't - hadn't betrayed you completely."

"I don't see that you betrayed me at all - not that I'd be worrying about it if you did, the circumstances being what they are."

"I should - should have found some way to keep Him out, instead of which He - He stripped my mind of information about the Order." Acceptance and genuine-seeming concern from Dumbledore still left him floundering as if the floor had been yanked sideways out from under him, but cringing and pleading had, shamingly, become his default position. "Albus I - "

"Hush, now - if you still managed to mislead Tom at all, you were doing much better than one could reasonably expect. You deserve a medal - literally - and I mean to see that you get one."

"A medal!" And there went harshness, bang on cue, even if it was directed at himself. "Just because I managed to keep one corner of my mind clear while I was - mewling for mercy and spilling every secret I possessed."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "I wish I was twenty years old, and handsome, and having an athletically sexual affair with a rich sultry widow twice my age"

**_New:_** "I wish I was twenty years old, and smoulderingly beautiful, and having an athletically sexual affair with a rich handsome bachelor twice my age"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to comment on the fact that Albus had sometimes been very hard on Snape in the past, before he was injured. Also, in view of JK's post-DH revelation that Albus is gay, not bi, his dream-date has been changed from "a rich sultry widow" to "a rich handsome bachelor", and his description of his ideal twenty-year-old self from "handsome" to "smoulderingly beautiful", in order to avoid having the word "handsome" twice in one sentence.

* * *

**8: WHAT HERMIONE DID NEXT**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "No I - not ready to be seen yet. Not - like this."

**_New:_** The younger man ducked his head, embarrassed, although trusting this new Albus not to curl his lip at him was starting to feel almost natural. "No I - not ready to be seen yet. Not - like this."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** they weren't just students any more, none of them, not even Potter - a constant thorn in his side

**_New:_** they weren't just students any more, none of them, not even Potter - a constant thorn in his side and a reminder of his own guilt

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** He lifted his head, trying to shake off the dizziness, and found himself facing Potter's green-glass gaze.

**_New:_** He lifted his head, trying to shake off the dizziness, and found himself facing Potter's green-glass gaze, so like and so unlike Lily's.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been slightly re-edited to point up the fact that Albus had formerly been quite dismissive of Snape's problems, and that Harry's presence makes Snape remember Lily, in order to bring it in line with the new canon backstory in _Deathly Hallows_.

* * *

**9: MATTERS ARISING**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** Thirty-nine years, and what had he to show for it?

**_New:_** Thirty-eight years, and what had he to show for it?

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** Snape's age has been reduced from thirty-nine to thirty-eight, to comply with the new canon backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_.

* * *

**10: SECRET ADMIRERS**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** He counted several of his colleagues as friends, of a sort, so why did having a student think of him as a friend feel so damned odd - both sweet and bitter? Perhaps because, when he was a student himself, he would have sold his soul to have somebody call him friend.

**_New:_** He counted several of his colleagues as friends, of a sort, so why did having a student think of him as a friend feel so damned odd - both sweet and bitter? Perhaps because, when he was a student himself, he would have sold his soul to have somebody call him friend in that natural way, as if it was a statement of fact and not just a ploy to get something out of him - especially after Lils had thrown him over.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been slightly edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to show that Snape did have some friends at school, although mostly they were exploiting him.

* * *

**11: AS OTHERS SEE US**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "When I was... a bit younger than you are, Sirius Black set me up"

**_New:_** "When I was... a couple of years younger than you are, Sirius Black set me up"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "It would make me feel as if I'd been caught in Filch's cupboard with my trousers down"

**_New:_** "It would make me feel as if I'd been caught in Filch's cupboard with my pants down"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "My _type_ as you call it would certainly include 'not a student' and 'significantly less than twenty years younger than myself'"

**_New:_** "My _type_ as you call it would certainly include 'not a student' and 'significantly less than twenty years younger than myself', and trust me when I say that 'significantly less' does not mean 'four months less'"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "What can I say to you? I'm not in love with you, I don't _know_ if I could come to feel as you feel - but I wouldn't rule it out so - resignedly."

**_New:_** "What can I say to you? I'm not in love with you, I don't _know_ if I could come to feel as you feel - I was in love once, when I was younger than you are now, and I thought that I would never feel that way again, but I wouldn't rule it out so - resignedly."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Even Albus saved me from Azkaban for the use he could make of me."

**_New:_** "Even my - my best friend when I was a child wanted me more for what I could teach her about magic than for myself, I think, and Albus only saved me from Azkaban for the use he could make of me."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, in order to include the fact that he did have that early friendship with Lily and had been in love once; to make him a year younger than the evidence in OotP had suggested; and to move the date of the werewolf "prank" back to early-to-mid fifth year. I've also changed the reference to being caught with his trousers down to being caught with his pants down, after a discussion on the Yahoo group Loose Canon concluded that wizards in general, and Snape in particular, probably don't wear trousers.

* * *

**12: TIME GOES BY**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "But I blew it, didn't I Albus? After a few weeks of - of pain I told them - I told the Dark Lord everything I knew. Thanks to me, he knows at least roughly where our headquarters are, he knows as much as you've told me about the prophecy, he knows you know about the Horcruxes - damnit, why did you tell me so much? You knew my position was precarious at best, that this might happen - "

"If I hadn't taken you into my confidence, dear boy, I would have been dead twice over - once from the accident which withered my arm, and once from the poison I drank whilst retrieving the false locket. Nobody else has your skill - and could you have treated me half so well, if you hadn't known what caused my injuries?"

**_New:_** "But I blew it, didn't I Albus? After a few weeks of - of pain I told them - I told the Dark Lord everything I knew. Thanks to me, he knows at least roughly where our headquarters are, he knows as much as you've told me about the prophecy, he knows you found the Peverell ring and broke it, knows that I suspected you thought the diary and the ring were both Horcruxes, even if you never used the word then, and the damned locket you were so keen to get - damnit, why did you tell me so much? You knew my position was precarious at best, that this might happen - "

"If I hadn't taken you into my confidence, dear boy, I would have been dead twice over - once from the curse which withered my arm, which would have spread and killed me if I hadn't come to you at once, and once from the poison I drank whilst retrieving the false locket. Nobody else has your skill - and could you have treated me half so well, if you hadn't known what caused my injuries?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Which were never as grave as you seem to think, and which you have expiated long since."

**_New:_** "Which were never as grave as you seem to think, and which you have expiated long since."

"You say so _now_" Snape said, restless and fretful, "because you pity me, so you want to soften the blow - but when I first came to you with my sins on my hands you told me I was disgusting because I - because I cared more about a friend than about an enemy."

"I was... interpreting your actions in the light of - of prior experiences which involved other people entirely, and I think now that I was wrong to do so. You proved to be... of much higher quality than I mistakenly thought at the time. You aren't an easy man to know, Severus, and I could never breach your shields and see your heart, then, even when I tried to destabilize you by attacking you. But I've seen it often enough since, with your permission, and I know it to be a sound one."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "You may... chivvy me for my own benefit, however. Albus always does,"

**_New:_** "You may... chivvy me for my own benefit, however. Albus has been amusing himself by doing so,"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional third paragraph):_** This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to reduce the amount which Dumbledore had told Snape about the Horcruxes prior to his capture; to specify that in this time-line Albus called Snape as soon as possible after the ring-curse hit him, and that is why he is still alive; and to begin to address the fact that Albus had been very harsh to Snape in the past.

* * *

**13: LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "Albus, I _wish_ you would let me do it. Twice already you've only survived by the skin of your teeth and my bloody skill, and even if you and Golden Wonder-boy do manage to retrieve Helga's cup without a fatality, trying to neutralize it is going to be third-time-unlucky, believe me."

**_New:_** "Albus, I _wish_ you would let me do it. Twice already you've only survived by the skin of your teeth and my bloody skill, and even if you and Golden Wonder-boy do manage to retrieve Helga's cup without a fatality, trying to neutralize it is going to be third-time-unlucky, believe me."

"It's by no means certain that the cup will be very heavily protected: the diary after all was not."

"But the ring and the locket and the godamn snake _were_ - are. And thanks to me he knows what happened to the ring, and that he needs to increase security. Anyone who tries to denature that cup is going to be cursed to a bloody smoking _cinder_."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** Yet, in an odd way, it was almost a pleasure to think about that queasy horror and know that it had brought him, less than two days later, into kindness and care and unexpected friendship; Adrian bringing him wine and choosing, for whatever strange reasons of his own, to continue to take an interest in him even after it was no longer strictly necessary;

**_New:_** Yet, in an odd way, it was almost a pleasure to think about that queasy horror and know that it had brought him, less than two days later, into kindness and care and unexpected friendship; Adrian bringing him wine and choosing, for whatever strange reasons of his own, to continue to take an interest in him even after it was no longer strictly necessary; Albus metamorphosing from stern commander to concerned mentor;

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Show me," Snape said commandingly, as thick blood well up in the hollow of his friend's hand. Adrian held his hand out, wordlessly, and Snape passed the end of his wand across it, singing under his breath a humming, buzzing, lilting little tune, and the cut flesh healed itself again.

**_New:_** "Show me," Snape said commandingly, as thick blood well up in the hollow of his friend's hand, though the sight and the iron smell of it brought a cold wash of nausea to clutch at his throat and prickle across his skin. Adrian held his hand out, wordlessly, and Snape swallowed hard and passed the end of his wand across it, singing under his breath a humming, buzzing, lilting little tune, and the cut flesh healed itself again.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "And so you're going to ride into the lists for me, wearing my favour? That would be - actually, seriously, that would be... almost overwhelming. Apart from Albus, nobody ever really... God. Having someone to fight for me. A real ally. God. But you have to promise to let me do the same for you, when I am - if and when Filius manages to make me a set of prostheses I can reliably stand on without falling on my arse. And if you kiss me like that again, I am seriously going to need ten minutes on my own."

**_New:_** "And so you're going to ride into the lists for me, wearing my favour? That would be - actually, seriously, that would be... almost overwhelming. Apart from Albus, nobody ever really... God. Having someone to fight for me. A real ally. God." And she would do it, that was the amazing thing but he could see it in the determined set of her fine-boned jaw: she would defy her housemates for him, as Lily in the end had not, and he thought that he might declare his allegiance to the Muggle-born Gryffindor chit in front of all Slytherin and hang the consequences, as his schoolboy self, in the end, had not. "But you have to promise to let me do the same for you, when I am - if and when Filius manages to make me a set of prostheses I can reliably stand on without falling on my arse. And if you kiss me like that again, I am seriously going to need ten minutes on my own."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory in _Deathly Hallows_, to comment on Snape's friendship with Lily and the harshness of his early relationship with Albus, and to reduce the amount of information which Albus had previously given him about the Horcruxes. In addition, Snape has been shown as feeling queasy when Adrian cuts himself: this was a detail which was simply forgotten about the first time round.

* * *

**14: ENTER THE DRAGON**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "I can do a corporeal Patronus... want to see?"

To her surprize he winced and dropped his eyes. "Then that's already more than I can do" he muttered. "I can only make a wavering ghost-image of one at best, not something that can hold its form - I - I don't have enough good memories to make a proper corporeal Patronus. Or if I ever did, the Dementors sucked them out of me when I was in Azkaban. But yes - show me. 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours' - isn't that what little boys are supposed to say to little girls behind the garden shed? We need to be able to recognize each other's Patronuses even when there isn't an opportunity to sense the... the spirit that animates the image."

She leaned in to kiss him until they were both breathing rather hard. "Have you tried lately?" she murmured. "Because if I need to put more work into creating good memories for both of us, I think I can bear the sacrifice." She kissed him again, then sat back, pulling her wand out of her sleeve. _"Expecto Patronum!"_

A moment later, her silvery otter was swimming through the air around them, seeming intrigued by Severus and appearing almost to sniff him as it gambolled past. Hermione smiled fondly at it. "Look, it likes you!"

He reached out to touch it, fascinated. "Amazing. I can put my hand through it, and yet it looks almost solid - which is much more than my own Patronus can do. And - seriously, I'm all for - trying to build up a stock of good memories involving... but at the moment anything to do with sex, anything to do with feeling aroused, is still all tangled up with terror and pain and - shame. However much... However - delightful carrying on with you may be, if I tried to use it to generate a Patronus in the presence of a real Dementor, it would be too easy for the mind-raper to twist and warp that connection and leave me - sobbing on the floor in a circle of Death Eaters again, waiting to see who'll be first. Not, however," he added lightly, "that that is any reason to desist from building up a stock of - pleasant memories having to do with sex. There are more important things in life than fooling around with a wand. Um - the wooden kind, that is."

He picked his new wand up off the bedside table and flourished it with self-mocking bravado. _"Expecto Patronum!"_ The cloud of sparkling silver which emerged was much thinner and more translucent than Hermione's otter, a wavering ghost which rippled as though projected onto the surface of moving water, but it was indeed rather clearer than usual, and it was possible to make out the sweeping tail and proud crest of a phoenix. "Fawkes, you see, Fawkes has been my safety and cried for me when I was injured ever since I first became Dumbledore's man. Except the last time, of course, when - Riddle made sure that even a phoenix's magic could not heal me or ease my pain, and my survival depended, in the last resort, on Harry bloody Potter's pig-headed refusal to accept the inevitable. But I absolutely refuse to have Potter become my new Patronus!"

Hermione reached out, her fingers brushing through the sweeping tail. "It's beautiful," she said softly, and then she sighed. "And... before... I wasn't really referring to sex." Egotistical, to hope that being loved by her would constitute a memory good enough for a Patronus. "I mean, waking up to find Professor McGonagall asleep on you with all her paws in the air, for example..." she added hastily, grinning at him. "Or Draco being safe, that could be a good one."

**_New:_** "I can do a corporeal Patronus... want to see?"

To her surprize he winced and dropped his eyes. "What is it, Severus?" she asked quietly, and then winced herself. "I know that - that it's a spell that even some very experienced and powerful wizards have problems with." A horrible suspicion was dawning that he truly had no good memories to draw on.

Severus shook his head tightly. "It's not that I _can't_ do one but it - not really mine, as such. A copy of... one that belonged to a friend."

Hermione frowned. "Belonged... in the past tense?"

The same sharp, curtailed movement - a nod, this time. "She died. And we - we were no longer on good terms when she - died, and it was my fault." That was enough, surely? - he didn't have to say that her death was his fault too, that he had seen her die... "I have no good memories, except of her friendship, or if I ever did have the Dementors sucked them out of me when I was in Azkaban. They didn't take my memories of her because they - hurt more than they healed, but by the same token the Patronus I generate in her memory can't save me from a Dementor either - it's too easy for them to twist it and make me remember her death, our quarrel" - my guilt, he added in the privacy of his own head. "And I've no other good memories that I could use to generate a Patronus of my own."

And he wasn't sure that he would if he could, that was part of the secret in his heart, that he prized his own penance, his own loyalty to a dead girl's memory, too much to want to give it up. He tried to push the thought aside, to concentrate on this other girl who might be his lover as Lily never was (even if he might not ever love her as completely as he had loved Lily), and flashed Hermione one of his dry, self-mocking smiles. "But yes - show me. 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours' - isn't that what little boys are supposed to say to little girls behind the garden shed? We need to be able to recognize each other's Patronuses even when there isn't an opportunity to sense the... the spirit that animates the image."

She leaned in to kiss him, and then felt guilty for it, knowing that it hadn't been solely for his comfort. The disguised pain in his voice when he spoke of his 'friend'... she'd have wagered there was more than friendship, at least for him, and he'd lost her and it still hurt him. It was horribly unfair to be jealous of her, whoever she was... but she couldn't bring herself to ask for a name, either. "Have you tried lately?" she asked, trying to sound as if she'd noticed nothing at all. "Because if I need to put more work into creating good memories for both of us, I think I can bear the sacrifice." She kissed him again, then sat back, pulling her wand out of her sleeve. _"Expecto Patronum!"_

A moment later, her silvery otter was swimming through the air around them, seeming intrigued by Severus and appearing almost to sniff him as it gambolled past. Hermione smiled fondly at it. "Look, it likes you!"

He reached out to touch it, fascinated. "Amazing. It looks almost solid - which is a lot more than mine did at your age. And - seriously, I'm all for - trying to build up a stock of good memories involving... but at the moment anything to do with sex, anything to do with feeling aroused, is still all tangled up with terror and pain and - shame. However much... However - delightful carrying on with you may be, if I tried to use it to generate a Patronus in the presence of a real Dementor, it would be too easy for the mind-raper to twist and warp that connection and leave me - sobbing on the floor in a circle of Death Eaters again, waiting to see who'll be first. Not, however," he added lightly, "that that is any reason to desist from building up a stock of - pleasant memories having to do with sex. There are more important things in life than fooling around with a wand. Um - the wooden kind, that is."

He picked his new wand up off the bedside table and flourished it with self-mocking bravado. _"Expecto Patronum!"_ The cloud of sparkling silver flowed together and formed itself into a delicate white doe, slender-legged and nervy and solemn-eyed, poised and tense as if to skitter away at a word.

"Oh, Severus," Hermione said softly; "she's - beautiful!"

"I wish I could claim that beauty for myself," he muttered, and thought that he meant it in more than one sense, for he had wished to have claimed Lily herself. "She was - beautiful, and the Patronus reflects the beauty in her, not in me." Did he still wish it? If Lily had loved him instead of James, things would have gone very differently but he would then have lost something valuable, a loving connection, as well as gained one.

Hermione gave him a troubled look, hating the way his gaze seemed to turn unhappily inwards on himself. "I don't think you could summon something so - so lovely, if you didn't have a bit of loveliness in you."

"Perhaps," he agreed, sounding sad and tired. "I've never been able to see any loveliness in myself, even before they... And I always thought that if I were ever to grow a Patronus of my own, one that wasn't a copy of hers, it would still be a mere bloody copy, because it would be Fawkes, the same as Dumbledore's. Fawkes, you see, Fawkes has been my safety and cried for me when I was injured ever since I first became Dumbledore's man. Except the last time, of course, when - Riddle made sure that even a phoenix's magic could not heal me or ease my pain, and my survival depended, in the last resort, on Harry bloody Potter's pig-headed refusal to accept the inevitable. But I absolutely refuse to have Potter become my new Patronus!"

Hermione reached out, her fingers tracing the soft, mobile ears, the slender column of the neck which arched under her hand. "It's beautiful," she said again softly, and then she sighed. "And... before... I wasn't really referring to sex." Egotistical, to hope that being loved by her would constitute a memory good enough for a Patronus, and she forced jealousy away again. She was glad that there had been someone, even if she'd died eventually, that his life hadn't been quite as lonely as it might have been. And she'd keep telling herself that until it was so.

"I mean, waking up to find Professor McGonagall asleep on you with all her paws in the air, for example..." she added hastily, grinning at him. "Or Draco being safe, that could be a good one."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** Behind him the phoenix wavered in the air like a fading TV signal, and went out.

**_New:_** Behind him the doe wavered in the air like a fading TV signal, and went out.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** he's a student, for God's sake, it's my job to keep him alive and safe and I've done everything in my power to do so, even though the bloody little fool seems hell-bent on throwing his life away on a whim.

**_New:_** he's a student, for God's sake, it's my job to keep him alive and safe and I've done everything in my power to do so, quite apart from the fact that his mother was a, a friend, and even though the bloody little fool seems hell-bent on throwing his life away on a whim.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** Black - after _years_ of bloody persecution he still managed to persuade me that he wanted to call a truce, that he was sorry for having humiliated me so badly at the end of the preceding year, that if I would only take his dare and go where they went, they would let me join their bloody little Gang of Four.

**_New:_** Black - after _years_ of bloody persecution he still managed to persuade me that he wanted to call a truce, and that if I would only take his dare and go where they went, they would let me join their bloody little Gang of Four.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_Old:_** We are told that the Bloody Baron is pale, gaunt and silent with blank, staring eyes, and is dressed in bloodstained robes - but we are never told whether it's his blood or someone else's. I think people usually vaguely assume that he was "bloody" in the sense of "Bloody Jefferies", the infamous "hanging judge": but he seems on the whole to be a force for order and safety at Hogwarts, not a dangerous monster, and the fact that the Baron is given to "groaning and clanking" in the Astronomy Tower suggests that he died in pain and in chains, and that he was the victim of an atrocity instead of (or possibly as well as) the perpetrator.

**_New:_** We are told that the Bloody Baron is pale, gaunt and silent with blank, staring eyes, and is dressed in bloodstained robes - but prior to _Deathly Hallows_ we were never told whether it was his blood or someone else's. I think people usually vaguely assumed that he was "bloody" in the sense of "Bloody Jefferies", the infamous "hanging judge": but he seems on the whole to be a force for order and safety at Hogwarts, not a dangerous monster, and the fact that the Baron is given to "groaning and clanking" in the Astronomy Tower suggested to us that he died in pain and in chains, and that he was the victim of an atrocity instead of (or possibly as well as) the perpetrator. This explanation has now been somewhat canon-shafted, but we are fudging it by assuming that the Grey Lady was fantasizing when she said the Baron was her fatal lover.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been re-edited to comply with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_. The main change is that Snape's Patronus is now a solid-looking silver doe, rather than a wavering phoenix, and the conversation about Patronuses has had to be substantially re-written. Other than that, there is more emphasis on the fact that Harry's mother was Snape's friend, and a reference to Sirius having lured Snape to the Shrieking Shack after the underpants incident has been removed.

* * *

**15: CRAWL BEFORE YOU CAN WALK**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "Somebody had to do it, and I seemed to be the only bloody candidate."

**_New:_** "Somebody had to do it, and I seemed to be the only bloody candidate. And I had - a guilt to expiate."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** Filius Flitwick was away, deep in rural Wales somewhere trying to break the complex mesh of charms and hexes sealing off an abandoned mineshaft which might, just possibly, hide Helga Hufflepuff's cup,

**_New:_** Filius Flitwick was away, schmoozing a distant goblin cousin in Aberystwyth in the hopes of gaining entry to the Lestrange family vault at Gringotts which might, just possibly, hide Helga Hufflepuff's cup,

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "No, what I need is somebody who is on my level - neither parent nor child - and who I can feel is _on my side_, as I am on theirs."

**_New:_** "No, what I need is somebody who is on my level - neither parent nor child - and who I can feel is _on my side_, as I am on theirs." Lily, as much as he had loved her and as much as she had been his friend, had been too critical and contrary to offer much in the way of support, and Avery and Mulciber had had a talent for sloping off whenever he needed actual backing against actual hexes - even before they had metamorphosed into jeering torturers.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "But it was designed to - well, to cut people. I know that sounds bad - but it doesn't cut very deep, and used properly it was intended to be defensive rather than offensive, to just - give somebody a little nick, to scare them off with, really. Potter might even find it useful to defend himself with, the next time he runs his silly neck into some Death Eater's noose. But if he used it clumsily - especially if he doesn't yet know much healing-magic - there's a risk he could hit an artery or an eye or something and do somebody real damage."

**_New:_** "But it was designed to - well, to cut people, and if you actually cut something off them it won't normally regrow.

"I know that sounds bad - but it was one of the few spells that would work on a werewolf and not just heal instantly and, well, you'll understand why I thought I might need it. And so long as you're careful with it it doesn't cut very deep, and used properly it was intended to be defensive rather than offensive, to just - give somebody a little nick, to scare them off with, really. Potter might even find it useful to defend himself with, the next time he runs his silly neck into some Death Eater's noose. But if he used it clumsily - especially if he doesn't yet know much healing-magic - there's a risk he could take someone's arm off or hit an artery or an eye or something and do somebody real damage."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "So, um, Sectumsempra was my way of saying "Cutter forever."

**_New:_** "So, um, Sectumsempra was my way of saying "Sever forever."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraphs):_** This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_, to show Flitwick trying to retrieve the Hufflepuff cup from Gringott's rather than from a mine-shaft, as we originally had it, and to comment on Snape's sense of guilt and on the fact that he did have friendships at school, but they weren't very supportive. The comments about Sectumsempra have also been adjusted.

I (whitehound) originally assumed that because Sectumsempra can be translated as "Sever Forever", and because Snape referred at the end of HBP to Harry stealing his spells, plural, Snape himself must have invented Sectumsempra, despite the fact that it was written in his book without any workings-out. But the revelation in DH that the name describes its action, and the casual way Remus refers to it as if it is a well-known spell, makes it more ambiguous. In my solo stories I have decided to have Snape not having invented the spell, but having simply adopted it because of the name. In this story, though, I left it as his own invention, since we had already written the conversation between him and Hermione about it.

Why would young Severus want to invent, or even learn, such a nasty spell? Well, the fact that Sectumsempra prevents missing bits from being regrown isn't as bad as it sounds, because we've plenty of evidence that the wizarding world can't usually replace missing bits _anyway_.

Then, we know werewolves are immune to most magic, because Snape had to be rescued from Remus. Were-Remus turns into a beast with paws who cannot hold a wand, so if magic worked on him Snape could simply have Stupefied him, and wouldn't have needed James to save him. We can also surmise that werewolves probably heal almost instantly - partly because tradition says that only silver can kill them, and partly because we know that in were-form Remus bites and scratches himself, and outside the realms of fanon there's no mention of him being scarred. So young Snape might well have felt that he needed such a spell which interfered with magical healing for protection from Remus - and we now know that the first time we see him use it, during the underpants incident, was _after_ Sirius tried to feed him to the werewolf.

If he invented that spell, or was taught it or a predecessor by his mother, when he was much younger, he might have had another reason. Growing up, as he probably did, somewhere in the Manchester area he would have started school while the notorious paedophile serial killers called the Moors Murderers were operating in that area. He or his mother might well have thought that a defensive spell which produced wounds which looked as if they'd been made by a Muggle weapon could be a literal life-saver.

* * *

**16: VOICE RECOGNITION**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** creative verbal bitchiness had always been one of his favourite pastimes, and one of the main planks of his friendship with Albus.

**_New:_** creative verbal bitchiness had always been one of his favourite pastimes, and one of the main planks of his friendship with Albus, insofar as what he had had with Albus prior to his immolation could be termed friendship.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "So, um, does that mean that you and my mum...?"

"Not in so many words. She was just - every boy in the school, practically, wanted to impress her, and she was - well, the only person I could actually talk to about Potions, apart from Horace Slughorn. We were in the Slug Club together, you understand. Having her see me - like that - " He grimaced. "I suppose I should be grateful that she didn't stay to see me actually stripped. It's mortifying enough to know that you saw..."

"Um. I didn't, actually. I didn't see that much of the memory, just - up to when they were threatening to - you know. I never knew whether they did or not." He looked down, colouring slightly and fiddling with a strand of the rug. "I'm sorry," he muttered. He looked up again in time to see Snape give him a tiny nod of acknowledgement, his mouth tightening at the corners as he did so.

"I'm sorry that I lost what little self-control I had left at that point and insulted your mother when she was trying to help me," Snape replied soberly, "but - well, quite apart from being nearly ready to drop dead from shear bloody embarrassment, I was bloody terrified. Slytherin House at that time had more Death Eater sympathisers than all the other houses put together, and even those that weren't were nearly all pure-bloods, and I was this scrawny, penniless, _common_ little half-blood, stuck there in the middle: I might as well have painted a bloody target on my back. I just about managed to hold my own because by that point they all knew I could come up with hexes and poisons they didn't know the antidote to, but if I'd let myself be publicly rescued by a Muggle-born girl - God." He pressed his hand against his mouth, an unconscious, nervous gesture, staring at Potter over the back of it. "At least your father and Black couldn't get at me while I was sleeping."

**_New:_** "So, um, does that mean that you and my mum...?"

"Not in so many words. But she was my friend, since we were children - my only friend, for a long time, and most of the other friends I made since turned out to be..." His mouth tightened as he made a wordless gesture indicating the scars which decorated it. "And she was - well, the only person I could actually talk to about Potions, apart from Horace Slughorn. I should have been content with that I suppose but she was - lovely. Every boy in the school, practically, wanted to impress her. Having her see me - like that - " He grimaced. "I suppose I should be grateful that she didn't stay to see me actually stripped. It's mortifying enough to know that you saw..."

"Um. I didn't, actually. I didn't see that much of the memory, just - up to when they were threatening to - you know. I never knew whether they did or not." He looked down, colouring slightly and fiddling with a strand of the rug. "I'm sorry," he muttered. He looked up again in time to see Snape give him a tiny nod of acknowledgement, his mouth tightening at the corners as he did so.

"I'm more sorry than you could believe that I lost what little self-control I had left at that point and insulted your mother when she was trying to help me," Snape replied soberly, "especially since - since I lost her friendship along with that self-control, and her friendship was... of great value to me. But - well, quite apart from being nearly ready to drop dead from shear bloody embarrassment, I was bloody terrified. Slytherin House at that time had more Death Eater sympathisers than all the other houses put together, and even those that weren't were nearly all pure-bloods, and I was this scrawny, penniless, _common_ little half-blood, stuck there in the middle: I might as well have painted a bloody target on my back.

"I did have a few friends in Slytherin, of a sort," (of the sort who had later become prominent among his torturers, his abusers), "but they weren't the sort that could be relied on for backup - as they proved when they stood by while your bloody father dangled me upside-down and stripped me. I knew right then, if I hadn't known it before, that I was on my own as far as my own house went. I just about managed to hold my own because by that point they all knew I could come up with hexes and poisons they didn't know the antidote to, but if I'd let myself be publicly rescued by a Muggle-born, Gryffindor girl - God." He pressed his hand against his mouth, an unconscious, nervous gesture, staring at Potter over the back of it. "At least your father and Black couldn't get at me while I was sleeping."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** Hermione smiled, and when Harry was turned away she kissed her fingertips and brushed them against Snape's scarred cheek. "Well, nobody ever gave Harry trouble about spending time with a girl, as far as I know, and boys usually do. They seem to accept me as a sort of force of nature."

**_New:_** Hermione smiled, and when Harry was turned away she kissed her fingertips and brushed them against Snape's scarred cheek. "Well, nobody ever gave Harry trouble about spending time with a girl, as far as I know, and boys usually do. They seem to accept me as a sort of force of nature." He gave her a tight, fleeting smile in return and wondered if Potter was right. If it had been Hermione all those years ago, and not Lily, would she have continued to defend him, even after his unforgivable insult? Would she have accepted his abject, stammering apologies, as Lily had not, and not thrown him over, as Lily had?

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph, prior to Blackjack instructions):_** This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_, to show that Albus and Severus had not been very close friends prior to Snape's torture, and to comment on Snape's friendship with Lily. Part of the scene between Harry, Snape and Hermione, where Harry asks about the nature of Snape's relationship with his mum, has been substantially re-written.

* * *

**17: THE NAME OF THE ROSE**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "But it was my fight at least as much as his, Longbottom, and I was willing to be risked. What would you think of a - an army officer, who sent other people's sons and other people's friends into danger, but kept his own friends safe?" He picked up the beer again and stared into its murky depths. "No, I have no quarrel with Albus for using any weapon he could against - Riddle, and I don't blame him in any way for what has happened to me. I knew the risks, and I accepted them; to complain now would be like a - a soldier moaning because pitched battle turned out to be more dangerous than a walk in the park. I took the King's Shilling - in a manner of speaking - and I knew what I was doing."

**_New:_** "But it was my fight at least as much as his, Longbottom, and I was willing to be risked. At least, he - he exerted pressure on me to become a spy in the first instance, but I had every reason to comply, both the personal, to - to protect a friend and to expiate my own guilt, and the political, because I had realized already that Riddle's dream of a resurgent wizardry was more of a bloody nightmare. And latterly - after Riddle's return he did give me a choice, whether to resume spying or not, and should he have refused to accept my compliance? What would you think of a - an army officer, who sent other people's sons and other people's friends into danger, but kept his own friends safe? Quite apart from the fact that neither running nor hiding would have done me much bloody good."

He picked up the beer again and stared into its murky depths. "No, I have no quarrel with Albus for using any weapon he could against - Riddle, and I don't blame him in any way for what has happened to me. I knew the risks, and I accepted them; to complain now would be like a - a soldier moaning because pitched battle turned out to be more dangerous than a walk in the park. I took the King's Shilling - in a manner of speaking - and I knew what I was doing."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "For the first time... for the first time I feel as if Adrian is right and I really am going to be - all right. If not quite yet, then eventually. And I have never - I never had anything like - " He stopped, cleared his throat. "Just - sitting with friends" he went on in a rush, "talking. Having friends _to_ sit and talk with." He took a sip of beer to cover his embarrassment, although he found that his hand was shaking slightly. "Albus doesn't really count. He's fond of me - I do believe that, now - but it's hard just to have a natural conversation with him, because he's such a bloody game-player."

**_New:_** "For the first time... for the first time I feel as if Adrian is right and I really am going to be - all right. If not quite yet, then eventually. And I have never - except sometimes at school I never had anything like - " He stopped, cleared his throat. "Just - sitting with friends" he went on in a rush, "talking. Having friends _to_ sit and talk with." He took a sip of beer to cover his embarrassment, although he found that his hand was shaking slightly. "Albus doesn't really count. He's fond of me - I do believe that, now, or at least that he's fond of me _now_ - but it's hard just to have a natural conversation with him, because he's such a bloody game-player."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_, to show that Snape did at least have some friends at school, that Albus was not a very close friend prior to Snape's being injured, and that Albus did strong-arm Snape into becoming a spy in the first instance, even if he agreed fairly willingly.

* * *

**18: TREACHEROUS FOOTING**

**Story text:**

**_Old:_** "She is alone, as I was,"

**_New:_** "She is alone, even more than I was,"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Everybody got to shag Cormac, practically," Tonks said with a grin, flicking her wand to cast restraining cords around both girls. "He was notorious for it, even in first year. Did you know he had a full beard when he was twelve?"

**_New:_** "Everybody got to shag Cormac, practically," Tonks said with a grin, flicking her wand to cast restraining cords around both girls, who seemed to be trying to tear each other's hair out by the roots. "He was notorious for it, even in first year. Did you know he had a full beard when he was twelve?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Nobody thought they needed to prevent it" the older woman said irritably. "Albus thought - we all thought - that you were... sound."

"And how bloody wrong you all were. But then he wasn't really seeing me, was he, just a - a tool."

"There's a level on which Albus sees everyone as a tool, including himself, and you know that people-skills were never his long suit. Unlike Black, though, you at least were a tool he actively liked. He really did, and does, trust you absolutely."

**_New:_** "Nobody thought they needed to prevent it" the older woman said irritably. "Not as compared with Sirius, anyway. Of course, we knew you were running with... bad company, but who in Slytherin was not, at that time? And the fact that you were such friends with a Muggle-born, a Gryffindor... Horace was quite sure that you were... sound, and Albus concurred."

"And how bloody wrong they both were. But then neither of them were really seeing me, were they, just a - a tool."

"There's a level on which Dumbledore sees everyone as a tool, including himself, and you know that people-skills were never his long suit. Unlike Black, though, you at least were a tool he valued very highly. He really did, and does, trust you absolutely."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_Old:_** "Jus' - just wish Albus was here to complete the set."

**_New:_** "Jus' - just wish Albus was here to complete the set." He was drowsily aware that before he was injured, before Albus's sudden access of sentimentality about his ruined carcass, the Headmaster had made a very doubtful father-substitute - but then he was used to the idea of a father as a cold and scornful task-master, and at least Albus, even in his earlier incarnation, had never actually beaten him and had praised him when he did well.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**_New (extra section, delineated by dividers, inserted after the three-way Severus/Minerva/Bloody Baron conversation):_** "You know, don't you," Minerva said thoughtfully, "that the Grey Lady has put it about that you murdered her in a fit of jealousy, because she had rejected your - your suit, and then killed yourself out of remorse?"

"Oh aye," the Baron replied, grinning a grin which revealed a mouthful of irregular tombstone teeth which made Severus's look almost pretty. "She disnae like people to know that _I_ dumped _her_. Let alane that she wis sae pish-poor at Herbology that she died of eating a dodgy mushroom."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

**Author's note:**

**_New (additional last paragraph):_** This chapter has been re-edited in accordance with the new backstory revealed in _Deathly Hallows_, to show that Severus wasn't completely friendless as a child, and that Albus made a remote, borderline-abusive father-figure before Severus was injured. The Daphne/Padma incident now has added hair-pulling, just because one of our reviewers asked for it, and the Baron explains why the Grey Lady's version of his death, as given in _Deathly Hallows_, differs from ours.


	22. 19 A Thousand Dreams That Would Awake Me

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

Apologies for the long delay in producing this next chapter, but we got held up by problems with Dyce's computer and general RL stuff. Also apologies to those people whose reviews I didn't reply to, but at the moment it's difficult to find more than twenty minutes a week to write in, and I figured you'd probably prefer a new chapter to review-answers.

* * *

**19: A THOUSAND DREAMS THAT WOULD AWAKE ME**

"Poppy tells my you actually managed to walk quite a long way through the castle before your legs folded, which is great news, leik - and that you've been bloody-well clawing at yourself again, which is a damned-sight less great."

Severus looked down and away, embarrassed by the concern in the younger man's eyes. "I was - disturbed, at the time, and Poppy is a damned gossip."

"Doctors' privilege" Adrian said, settling himself comfortably on the sofa and helping himself to Severus's brandy. "She misses spending time with you, you know."

"I'd have thought she would have seen enough of me to last her a lifetime, since..." He touched his fingertips - the real ones - briefly to the scar which sliced across his cheek.

"It wasn't just professional concern that brought her down here, you daft bugger - she's really fond of you."

"As strange as that may seem. Well, when I am a little more... practised at leaving my rooms, I've no doubt she has plenty of work for me to do in the infirmary. Horace is a competent brewer but he's too lazy to meet Poppy's exacting standards: she likes to have at least a month's-worth of supplies in hand."

"She's a tartar, isn't she?"

"A martinet of the first water," Severus agreed with a fleeting smile.

"I thought that was something to do with horses?" Neville said, emerging with an armload of cloth from what had been Severus's bedroom, _Before_, and still housed his wardrobe and chest of drawers.

Both men thought about this, frowning, before Adrian gestured widely with the glass in his hand. "I think you mean a martingale."

"That sounds like some sort of bird," Neville said doubtfully. He shook the pair of black trousers and the linen shirt out and performed a quick charm to remove any creases. "Here you are, sir."

"You'll have to help me get into them: I'm still not steady enough to stand on one leg, or deft enough withthis" - he gestured vaguely with the prosthetic hand - "to manage buttons." The possibilities for error in using the prosthetic to do up his flies were wince-making, but he was determined to go to the formal house meeting formally dressed; not as-good-as-naked under his robes as he was when sitting around in his own rooms. He was dreading the meeting, frankly, but he found that the students lacked concentration after dinner, so Friday afternoon or a weekend it had to be. And tomorrow half the students would be disappearing off home for the two-week Easter holiday, although his own faithful team of carers and most of his guards would be staying.

As he propelled himself nearly-steadily to his feet, and did his best not to fall as Neville coaxed the trousers over said feet and up his mostly-unreal legs, a small, reminiscent smile tugged at the scarred corners of his mouth, as he remembered a pleasant evening spent demonstrating to Hermione that there were still some things he could perfectly-well manage to do one-handed.

Best not to think about it too - as it were - hard, since it wouldn't do to have an embarrassing reaction while Longbottom was practically eyeball to groin with him; because unfortunately dressing himself was not one of the things he could manage one-handed, even if - "Oh - damn! I don't bloody believe this."

"What is it?"

"Nothing," he muttered, colouring and refusing to meet Adrian's eyes.

"If there's a problem - "

"My bloody pants won't do up, OK? I've been lying around eating my bloody head off for six bloody months and now - it's not _that_ bloody funny, Longbottom."

"You see," Adrian said with a grin, "Itold you you needed more exercise."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Severus wondered if Draco had consulted with Hermione on the subject of champions.

When his bodyguard had escorted him into the Slytherin common-room, with Draco hovering at his side and rather obviously trying not to look as if he was poised to grab his godfather's elbow at the first hint of a stumble, he had found the desks and couches all moved to one side, where a small contingent - those he knew to be loyal to Voldemort - lounged with varying degrees of casualness. The rest stood in ranks, smallest to the front and the tallest behind, ranged in front of a small silvery cauldron that bubbled gently over a flickering magical fire burning on the bare stone of the floor - green fire, naturally, and the steam rising from the cauldron smelled of rosemary and dried hound's-tongue, which might be the early stage of any one of at least sixteen different potions. Horace Slughorn stood beside it, for once wearing simple robes instead of ornate velvets and bright colours, his hands folded and his expression positively funereal.

Behind the cauldron a sturdy, plain armchair stood on a circular rug that he hadn't seen before, in Slytherin green but decorated with a pattern of ferns rather than snakes. Draco steered him discreetly towards the chair and moved to stand at his right hand, drawing himself up and tucking his hands behind his back. When Severus looked to his left, Millicent Bulstrode had taken up exactly the same position, and when he turned his head a little further he saw Crabbe and Goyle moving into position behind him. He felt absurdly and touchingly like a feudal lord seated in state, with his loyal - and disloyal - followers come before him. The sensation only increased when Horace moved up to stand beside Draco, playing the Trusted Advisor to the hilt.

It helped, though his hand was still shaking and he had to work to keep his breathing steady. Being out of his rooms, even in a place he knew so well, was unsettling. But he was guarded, he was safe... and he was mortally embarrassed to realize that several of the smaller students (and a few older ones) were in tears, and trying to smile in spite of it, so he was confronted with a sea of small, wobbly, damp faces that were as far from frightening as anything could be just now, for him.

Pansy Parkinson stepped forward, out of the middle of the group, and he had to clear his throat of a bubbling mix of sentiment and laughter when he saw that she had decided to honour the occasion by wearing Muggle clothing, as Draco did. She hadn't gone so far as to don trousers, but the blue dress showed a lot more leg than any robe ever did, and her calves were the focus of some fairly intense interest among the fourth and fifth year boys.

She ignored them, folding her hands before her and standing very straight. "We are glad to see you, sir," she said quietly, inclining her head. Behind her, a soft murmur of assent rose, with the glares of the small faction of would-be Death Eaters a minor counterpoint at best. "We've missed you - not that Professor Slughorn isn't filling in quite well, of course."

"Well, that puts me in my place, doesn't it?" Horace said cheerfully. "Oh, don't worry, my dear, I quite understand. I'm a stranger to all of you, and of course you want your own Head of House back."

Severus gave him an alarmed look. "Horace, I am hardly in any position to resume - "

"Of course, of course... but they do favour you, dear boy." Horace showed brief signs of becoming sentimental, but thankfully he shook it off, turning brisk again. "Now. As I believe you know, Slytherin House is unfortunately divided at the moment. Miss Parkinson has... ah... volunteered to speak for the contingent who support you openly."

"She announced she was going to do it and nobody dared argue," Draco muttered out of the corner of his mouth. Draco was looking worryingly pleased with himself.

Pansy lifted her upturned nose slightly higher in the air, and Horace hurried on. "Miss Parkinson's group have expressed a firm allegiance to you personally, and are willing to be guided by your... political affiliations. Mr Zabini on the other hand has been asked to represent those who have so far refused to take sides. His faction is, I believe, in the majority at the moment."

Blaise Zabini stepped forward, as the ranks of students parted, so that the bulk were standing behind Blaise, with a clear gap between them and the "open supporters" who moved to stand behind Pansy. "Sir," Blaise said mildly, giving Severus a small nod.

"Mr Zabini." Not wanting to leave her out, since her greeting had been much the warmer, Severus nodded to Pansy as well. "Miss Parkinson."

"Mr Battersby has asked to represent those students who have always actively opposed He Who Must Not Be Named, and had never previously supported you because they believed your loyalties lay with that camp." Horace gestured. "Move along, there."

This group was even smaller than that of the would-be Death Eaters - about a dozen all told, mostly those whom Severus knew to be openly or secretly from mixed-blood families. Billy Battersby stepped forward, clearing his throat nervously. "Hello, sir," he whispered, not quite managing to look Severus in the eye.

"Mr Battersby." Severus took what he hoped would be a calming breath. It was, so far, going better than he'd hoped. There had been no shouting or accusations, and everything seemed quite... organized. He hadn't expected that.

"Those who choose to openly declare their allegiance to He Who Must Not Be Named have not yet agreed on a representative - "

"I'll do it." A tall sixth year stood and stepped forward. Liam Bennet, an icily reserved young man who had never opened up to his Head of House. "As the most senior, since Daphne was... lost to us."

The other three groups had moved up in silent support of their representatives. Bennet's back should by rights be bleeding, with all those knife-edged glares boring into it. He didn't greet Severus, just folded his arms and stared straight ahead.

"Er... would anyone like to go first?" Horace said, obviously realizing halfway through the sentence that offering that kind of opening to more than a hundred and fifty squabbling students was foolish in the extreme.

"Can I... um... say something?" Battersby spoke up quickly, while Pansy's mouth was still opening. "Please?"

Pansy blinked and nodded. "You may go first."

Severus saw Bennet's eyes narrow, and restrained his own nervous smirk. First point to Miss Parkinson, snatching control of the meeting neatly out of Horace's grasp.

"I wanted to... I mean, we wanted to..." Battersby shifted awkwardly, finally managing to look Severus in the eyes. "We want to say we're sorry, sir," he said in a small voice. "For... for not treating you very well. We didn't know, and we're all very sorry that you g-got hurt."

Severus cleared his throat. "I do understand, Mr Battersby," he said awkwardly. "No more need be said on the subject."

"Yes, sir." Battersby's nerve seemed to fail, and he stared at his shoes. Millicent Bulstrode was giving him a distinctly approving look, though.

"May I speak?" Zabini drawled, glancing at Pansy. An alliance there, if Severus was any judge. Zabini and Pansy had always got along reasonably well, and Zabini wasn't much of an organizer.

Pansy nodded. "By all means," she said sweetly, taking control of the meeting a little more firmly.

Zabini nodded. "We have our reasons for not choosing sides in this war," he said coolly. "I, for one, have no greater desire to see Dumbledore in power than He Who Must Not Be Named, nor do I want to be involved in this pointless struggle between two old men who should have died long ago."

Millicent snorted. "You never did have much in the way of balls, Zabini."

"That's all right, Bulstrode, you're man enough for both of us," Zabini sneered elegantly. "However, my political allegiance and my House allegiance are not the same thing. While I will not take a side in the war, as a member of House Slytherin I acknowledge Professor Snape as my Head of House. I will offer him the respect and loyalty due him as the holder of that worthy position." He quirked an eyebrow elegantly at Pansy. "In this I speak for the undecided. He is our Head of House, and in that capacity we will obey his wishes and offer him no threat or harm. Will that do?"

"Will you defend him against anyone else who will do him threat or harm?" Pansy asked, folding her arms and matching Zabini stare for stare.

"Some will, some won't." Zabini shrugged, glancing over at Bennet and his group. "But we won't interfere when you do, that we're all willing to agree on."

Bennet snorted. "You might at least try not to sound as if you've been rehearsing this," he said, contempt marring what might under other circumstances have been a handsome face.

Pansy smirked. "Honestly, Bennet, how do you expect to rise in the ranks of You-Know-Who's supporters if you can't even manage a simple manoeuvre like forming your alliances _before_ the confrontation?"

"Well, to give him his due, it's not as if anyone was going to ally with them anyway," Zabini said mildly. "Still, you might have at least tried, Bennet. I would have listened to any offers you were willing to make. I wouldn't have taken them, of course, but I would have listened."

"And he calls himself a Slytherin." Pansy shook her head sadly. "Battersby?"

"Oh, we're with you, Miss Parkinson!" Battersby said quickly. "He's a hero, after all. Now that we know, we'll be proud to pledge our loyalty."

"Good boy." Pansy smirked, clearly enjoying the admiring "Miss Parkinson". "As for you, Bennet, your position is insecure, and getting more so by the minute."

He shrugged. "We don't really care. When the Dark Lord finally defeats Dumbledore and his precious Boy Who Lived, he'll know we were loyal."

An angry murmur rippled through the larger group, even Blaise giving Bennet a filthy look.

"Brave words, Mr Bennet," Severus said, trying to sound calm and controlled instead of desperately nervous. "For your sake, I hope that the Dark Lord never knows of your loyalty. It his nature to distrust loyalty, and to test it to breaking point." He gestured to himself, in all his ruined glory, and shrugged slightly. "And you know what he is capable of if one should fail those tests."

"I know what he is capable of if he is betrayed." Bennet's eyes never flickered.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Pansy had planned this carefully.

She'd approached Zabini with an offer as soon as she was sure the meeting would take place. She and Blaise had never been exactly close, but they'd known each other for a long time, well enough for a certain amount of trust between them. She trusted Blaise to carefully consider his own best interests, and he trusted her to be able to manipulate the situation in her favour.

Battersby had been easy. He was a sentimental kid, already all teary over how he'd misjudged Professor Snape. She'd offered him a chance to "make it up" to the Professor and he'd followed her lead as meek as a little lamb. She couldn't imagine how the kid ever got into Slytherin.

Now she watched Bennet, frowning a little. She hadn't even known who would eventually speak for the pro-Dark Lord faction, so she hadn't been able to make a proper plan for dealing with them. And she didn't like the way he was sneering at Professor Snape, who looked as if he was tired and strained and trying to hide it.

Millie obviously didn't like it, either. "Shut your face, Bennet," she snarled, shifting forward just a little.

Pansy's opinion of Bennet's intelligence dropped further when he completely failed to back off. No sane person would actually try to challenge Millie - especially when she was backed up by Crabbe and Goyle - without substantial backing of his own. But instead of retreating with appropriate caution, he actually lifted his chin defiantly. "Make me."

"I'll - "

"Miss Bulstrode," Professor Snape said quietly.

Millie shifted back to her place, still glaring at Bennet. On the Professor's other side, Draco had moved up as well, one hand hovering unobtrusively near the pocket holding his wand.

"What were you going to do?" Bennet ignored the Professor, looking Millie up and down with a sneer. "Beat me up? I'm sure you could. You look like you're at least part ogre - "

Millie scowled, and Crabbe actually growled. "That's enough, Bennet," Draco said frostily.

"Or what?" Bennet glared. "I don't think you quite understand the situation here, Malfoy. We see no reason to obey the traitor, and certainly not you. You may have us outnumbered, but what will you _do_ to us? Send us to Coventry? We have no desire to speak with you anyway. Give us detentions or lines? We won't do them. Try to force us into line with curses?" He shook his head. "That ends in blood on the walls of the dormitories... or worse."

Severus drew a deep, unsteady breath, clutched hard at the arm of the chair and jerked himself to his feet. Ignoring Draco's anxious hover he took a step towards Bennet, and another, trying his damnedest to make his jerking gait look like an intimidating stalk instead of the imminent collapse it felt like. He could hear the drawn breaths as everyone in the room watched his progress in silent awe or unease, and his own sense of the dramatic rose up like a dark tide and steadied his shaking nerves.

It was Sod's Law that Bennet would be taller than him, so that he couldn't loom at him effectively, but he thrust his sharp face forwards and fixed the boy with his best gimlet-like, black-eyed stare. "Mr Bennet," he said softly, and was darkly pleased to see Bennet straining to hold himself as far away from him as he could get without actually taking a step back. "You have allied yourself openly with the forces of violence and murder, and those who live by the sword shall die by it. You cannot expect that your opponents will treat you with a restraint which your allies would not show to them, and you are greatly outnumbered. Your safety so far has depended on my authority, but in my current state of health I cannot guarantee to be able to continue to protect you. If it comes to blood on the walls, it _will_ be yours."

Bennet opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again with an expression of mulish defiance. After a moment his eyes shifted aside uneasily. "Professor Slughorn - " he began.

"Oh, don't look at me," Horace replied in a suspiciously cheerful tone. "I'm just an old man who should have retired to a life of peaceful reminiscence long since: if it comes to open warfare I wouldn't know where to start."

Severus rubbed tiredly at the bridge of his nose, trying to push back the thumping headache which he could feel building up like a thundercloud. "We do have a duty to protectall the children, Horace," he said sternly: "even those of whose politics we disapprove." It was true, and it also had the added benefit of publicly downgrading Bennet from threat to threatened and from enemy to client.

"You're right, of course," Horace said chattily. "_Ideally_ one would like to be able to protect all members of Slytherin House equally..."

"Ideal or not," Severus said shortly, intentionally ignoring Bennet as he turned about in a swish of robes that blew across the boy like a physical dismissal, and taking the three strides back to the chair in time to sit down before he fell down, "we are contractually and ethically obliged to do our best to protect all students, unless their conduct is so extreme as to make them the Ministry's problem rather than ours." He winced inwardly, thinking about Greengrass, surely on her way to a one-way ticket to Azkaban.

As he lowered himself carefully into the chair and turned back to face the students, he glowered at Bennet and the other Voldemort supporters. "Nevertheless, a _sensible_ person doesn't push his luck."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Severus couldn't quite see what Nott was dropping into the cauldron, but he saw the sudden cloud of pale green steam, and heard the whispered chant. It wasn't a potion he was familiar with personally, but it struck him as familiar all the same. By the archaic Latin, something very old indeed...

He recognized it as Nott stepped away and Pansy took his place, wielding a slender silver needle. No potion he'd ever made, nor ever thought to - it wasn't so much a potion as a particularly complex ink, a component of a larger spell.

Draco stepped forward, giving Severus a reassuring smile as he let out a faint noise of protest. Draco held out his right hand, palm down, and cleared his throat. "Being a member of Slytherin House, and owning Professor Severus Snape as the true and rightful Head of that House, I hereby swear honour and fealty to him for so long as he may live."

Pansy dipped the needle into the boiling potion, and with one swift movement drove it into the back of his hand. Draco winced slightly, but he didn't move as Pansy withdrew the needle and dipped it in the potion again, adding Draco's blood to the mixture.

Draco moved back to his place, rubbing the back of his hand. As he assumed his position again, he turned the hand towards Severus. The green ink was still spreading under the skin, outlining a slender hound, the traditional representation of loyalty.

Severus felt the chill shock pass through him like a jolt of electricity. Automatic, unbidden, his hand - the real one - moved to grasp at the place on the prosthetic arm where the Dark Mark had once been, but a slight movement caught his eye and he looked up rather wildly to see Horace watching him with steady concern. As he caught the older man's eye, his former Head of House shook his head almost imperceptibly.

Deep breath, deep breath... "The _Fides Nota_," Severus said quietly, dropping his gaze and forcing himself to speak normally through a suddenly dust-dry mouth as Millicent Bulstrode moved towards the cauldron.

"Yes," Draco said, looking embarrassed and very proud of himself. "After Greengrass, and the infighting... we wanted you to know, really know, who could be trusted and who couldn't. Longbottom got us the herbs and things."

The _Fides Nota_ - literally, the Mark of Fidelity. It hadn't been in common use for centuries, and he was surprised that any of his students had ever heard of it. Containing as it did the blood of the person so marked, it could not be magically fooled. As long as the person wearing it held to his or her oath, whatever it might have been, the tattoo would bear witness. Any betrayal of that vow, and the mark would vanish forever. A proper_Fides Nota_ couldn't be faked, and no two batches would produce exactly the same image. If any member of his guard violated their oath of fealty - and he really must have words with Hermione about giving Draco these feudal ideas! - it would be immediately apparent.

When his guard had made their oaths, Zabini stepped up next. He offered not his hand but his arm, sleeve rolled up to the elbow, glancing sidelong at Severus as he did so. "Being a member of Slytherin House, and acknowledging Professor Severus Snape as the duly appointed head of that noble House, I swear that I will offer him no injury nor offense, nor aid another in doing him harm, until such time as I leave this school and this House behind me."

Pansy nodded, not quite approvingly, and jabbed the needle into his lean forearm. Zabini turned to show the spreading lines of ink along his arm to Severus and his guard, and then stepped back to his group.

Battersby was next, holding out a chubby hand. "Being a member of Slytherin House, but very opposed to He Who Must Not Be Named and all his works, I do solemnly swear my loyalty to Professor Severus Snape, for so long as he opposes He Who Must Not Be Named in our great struggle," he said, with the kind of big-eyed sincerity that only the very young could do convincingly.

Then the three groups merged to form a line, each student approaching the cauldron in turn. Most repeated the oaths made by the leaders of their factions, some had variations of their own. When the twelfth attempted to approach, Pansy shook her head. "No Firsties, Daventry. I told you all that."

Daventry, a minuscule scrap with tufty blond hair, scowled. "But - "

"No. Out of the line."

He sighed and plodded over to one side, where the other first-years were gathering. They were mostly strangers to Severus, of course, but he recognized families in some of those small faces. Daventry, for example, had two older sisters. Perhaps they had told their brother some good of their ill-tempered head of house.

The thirty-first, a fourth-year girl with dark hair, made her oath and offered her forearm. Pansy plied her needle, and the girl stepped back... and then clutched her arm. "Ow!"

Crabbe stepped forward, taking hold of her arm and turning it ungently towards him. "It hasn't taken on this one," he reported after a moment. "Not a drop of green."

"Knew we'd get at least one," Pansy said smugly. "Nice try, Stroud. Over with the opposed."

Stroud glared at her, then spat out a curse and marched over to the small cluster of Voldemort's loyalists.

"Nice for us to all know where we stand, isn't it?" Pansy said sweetly. "Next!"

Excluding the first years, one hundred and seventeen students took their oaths of varying degrees of loyalty. Five more "failed"... three who took their places with the opposed, and two who refused, on the basis that while they were perfectly willing to sell their loyalty to the highest bidder, that bid had not yet been received.

When the last hand, forearm, shoulder or (in one case) nape had been suitably marked, Pansy dipped the needle one last time. "Being a member of Slytherin House, and owning Professor Severus Snape as the true and rightful Head of that House, I hereby swear honour and fealty to him for so long as he may live - and moreover, that any person who violates the oaths made this night will be dealt with as harshly as my abilities permit." She lifted one foot, and drove the needle firmly into her ankle. Green ink spread to outline a hound that Severus could have sworn looked pleased with itself, as it turned about on the spot and settled into position.

"There," she said, laying the needle carefully aside. "Now we all know where we stand."

"Yes." Severus blinked at them all, feeling heavy and troubled and lulled almost asleep by the sweet aromatic scent of rosemary - rosemary for remembrance. "The lines of alliance and allegiance have been drawn and made public. And for those of you who have chosen to ally yourselves with me, my - " command, but he wouldn't say command - "my instruction is that those lines are not to become lines of battle, and that means, Miss Bulstrode, no offensive hexes unless the other side hit you first." He looked at Bennet's offensively smug face, wavering in the heat haze from the cauldron, and thought about what a would-be Death Eater might be capable of on a first strike. "I leave it to your own judgement, however, to distinguish between offensive and defensive hexes. Within reason."

There: that should ensure that the blasted girl didn't actually maim anybody for life...

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"Horace, I can't - I don't know if I can cope with this. Why - _why_ did you agree to it?"

"Because I am at least as worried about your safety as you are, my boy - probably more so. And just because... Riddle uses a charmed mark to control his followers, doesn't mean all charmed marks are evil. He uses a wand but you aren't going to forego yours."

"That's not - not the point."

"Don't worry, godfa'," Draco said, giving the older man's arm a reassuring pat; "you don't have what it takes to be an Evil Overlord."

"Oh _thanks_. If I'd known what you were going to do I would have stopped you at once."

"That's why I didn't warn you in advance," his godson replied frankly. "I knew that once we'd got the thing started, you wouldn't undermine my authority within the student body by aligning yourself against me in front of them."

Severus raised both eyebrows. "Don't you mean, Miss Parkinson's authority?"

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"I thought you should know," Filius said quietly, "that Miss Patil and Miss Greengrass have been remanded in custody in the Ministry holding cells until - until the Ministry decides what to do about a trial."

Severus nodded sourly. "I suppose it's an advance that they're actually planning to hold a trial, even though..."

Filius patted his knee gently. "I'm sure they'll be able to arrange for you to give evidence _via_ mirror-talk, if - if they need you to."

"Yes." Severus could feel the shudder starting in his stomach, threatening to develop into a full-scale fit of the shakes. He remembered the holding cells, remembered rolling and scrabbling in the dust as smiling Aurors subjected him to round after round of Ministry-sanctioned _Crucio_, bruises and broken bones and the darkness and despair of Azkaban, waiting for weeks to see if Dumbledore would or could convince the Wizengamot to release him, as the spectre at the door forced him to relive every horror in his head over and over again. At least the Aurory no longer openly tortured suspects, and Azkaban was Dementor-free by default.

"Oh God, Filius, this wasn't - wasn't what we planned when we watched them being Sorted, was it? The parents - " Alexander and Roberta Greengrass might be Death Eater sympathisers but they were no worse than thousands of slightly stupid, slightly snobbish pureblood families and they had surely never planned to see their only daughter thrown into Azkaban at seventeen, there to linger for whatever remained of her life, where they would never even be allowed to visit her or speak to her ever again until she died, and their only hope for her would be that that death would come soon. "Stupid, _stupid_ - !"

Filius shook his head wordlessly, his eyes brimming with tears, then cleared his throat. "Miss Patil - Parvati that is - I saw her yesterday and she'd hacked her hair off short with a knife I suppose she - she wants not to be like her sister either."

"All over me," Severus said bitterly, "and was it bloody worth it?"

"You mustn't blame yourself for what they chose to do to you, really you mustn't."

"Mustn't I? But Greengrass was right, I pretended to be on their side and all the time I was betraying them, it's not surprising that they should hate me, is it? If I had been more honest, not a, a creeping spy - "

"...then Harry and I and all the rest of them would have been killed at the Ministry," Luna said brightly, looking up from her essay on the uses of rongorongo in heavy-duty levitation spells. "We needed you to creep, really we did."

"And I suppose I've been bloody well-punished for it, haven't I?"

"Never, never think that you deserved what happened," Filius said soberly. "And I could wish that Padma's motives had been as serious-minded as Daphne's, but I'm afraid that to her you were just - a prop in her teenage rebellion."

"She always was rather a silly, vain girl," Luna said firmly. "Everybody was just a prop to her, or a mirror."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

After practising Legilimency with him several times, Hermione found that she now had a "feel" for Severus all the time; could tell what he was feeling, at least to some extent. The slightest disturbance would wake her now, as attuned to his night-time terrors as she was, so it was no surprize when the sound of his soft, low, repeated cries roused her from half-sleep to find him turning his head restlessly, his eyes tightly shut and his lips skinned back from his teeth in his distress.

"Severus - love - come on. Wake up now..." But he seemed unable to hear her, and when she tentatively touched his shoulder he yelped and cowered away as if her touch had burned him.

"Severus," she tried again, pitching her voice low and soothing as she sat up and gazed anxiously down at him. "It's just a nightmare, love, it's all right, I'm here..." But her voice didn't seem to reach him, and she bit her lip, wondering if she should try touching him again.

Still apparently asleep he groaned and arched his back, trying to twist away from something. Hermione tried again, resting her fingers very lightly on his side, but he jumped and convulsed at even that slight contact and his eyes flew open, staring wildly at something only he could see.

Hermione summoned light with her wand, conjuring pink and blue flames as well as yellow ones to the candles near the bed. Light and colour were always worth a try, and at least his eyes were open now. "It's all right, Severus," she said gently. Instead of touching him, she tried hitching the blankets up around him, continuing to murmur comfort and reassurance in the hopes that some of it would get through. But he only shook his head, whether at her or at something in his mind's eye she couldn't tell, and gave a low wail; then abruptly arched up again as tight as a bow and screamed, shrilly, more like a child than a grown man. As he collapsed back out of the arc of pain his eyes focused on Hermione and for a moment she hoped that she had reached him, but in the next moment he struck out at her in panic: she jerked out of the path of the blow and he shrieked again and tried to scramble away from her, cringing, pressing himself against the head of the bed and shaking as tears of misery and terror ran down his face.

Hermione slid out of the bed hastily, biting her lip hard. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry... it's all right, it is, it's all right..." She whispered a charm, careful to keep the wand out of his sight, to warm the room. Warmth, light, colour... what else, what else, there had to be something else she could do. "You're safe, now, it's going to be all right..."

But nothing she could do or say seemed to make any difference, she could do nothing to break through his panic hysteria as he jumped convulsively again and overbalanced to lie sprawled on his side in a loose curl, as white as the pillow under him, his eyes wide-open but blinded as he shook and wept until he gasped for breath, jerking and whimpering under unseen remembered blows.

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"It was - it was horrible Severus, I had to call Rinna and get her to fetch Madam Pomfrey to sedate you and even then you kept crying and crying and I just - couldn't help you, I was - " She gulped and looked down at the floor miserably. "I was _useless_. There just - you were so scared, and there wasn't anything I could do to help you. Nothing at all."

The object of her concern gazed at her wearily from what felt like a great distance - made all the fuzzier by the lingering effects of Poppy's sedative-of-choice. His own attempt to sedate himself with cowslip wine the night before had sent him to sleep all right, but to no easy rest.

He knew that in the dream-memory he had been sobbing with hunger and exhaustion as much as pain, that he had cried for sleep and been permitted none, and the warmth and safety of his own bed in his own room made him feel as if his bones had turned to water. Half his mind was taken up with wonder at the crisp lightness of the clean sheets which had replaced the sweat-soaked linen of the night, at the little bubble of physical and emotional comfort which had pushed the howling darkness aside for another day, but he drew an unsteady breath and dragged himself back into focus for her sake. "Listen to me, Hermione," he said softly. "Listen."

He reached out rather tentatively and tilted her chin up with his long fingers. "Having flashbacks is - dreadful, but sometimes what I remember is, is not so..." He paused and jerked his head in irritation, trying to jolt himself into clarity through the lingering haze of sedation.

"You know that when I was - there, in That Place, there was nothing of which I could be unaware. I wasn't permitted to miss a single bloody second of my own - piecemeal destruction, and when I was - when I was brought to the hospital wing I was still... agonizingly awake. Hyper-aware. I couldn't comprehend what was going on around me, but even so - even so, lying in the dark in that bloody storeroom for however long it was, I was mad with pain but at least there was nobody shouting, pawing, jeering, at least it was _steady_ pain, I wasn't being hounded, driven into this insane panic any more and so when I - when they brought me to Poppy, even though I can't - can't - " His dark eyes had dilated into utter blackness, and Hermione felt the tremor in his fingers as he mastered himself again.

"Even though now, looking back," he went on quietly, after he had regained control of his breathing, "I can hardly comprehend how much it all hurt, and even though whatever I had left of a conscious mind was just - subsumed in suffering, still I wasn't completely panic-stricken any more and three things did manage to reach me. Three things I almost understood.

"The third thing was Adrian, touching me without hurting, easing the pain and that - ridiculous, comfortable Geordie accent telling me that I was still a man and not a _thing_ and that everything would be all right. The second thing was Minerva, ordering me to keep breathing in that schoolmarm manner as if I was eleven again, and promising me that my agony had term and limit and would soon be over.

"But the first thing -" He took a deep breath and gave her the faintest and wryest of smiles. "The first thing was you, that - hard, aluminium-bright voice taking charge and the tone of it still set my teeth on edge, even after - but I thought Granger, Granger knows what she's doing, if she's got her bossy voice on then I'm in safe hands. That - strident, managing voice of yours was the first - the first shred of respite or comfort I'd had for four interminable months of agony and, and shame. You were my safety then, and now."

She sniffed, her lip quivering a little, and hugged him gently, cradling him lovingly close to her. "I was scared out of my wits," she admitted quietly. "You were so badly hurt, and nobody seemed to know what to do. But then I knew what needed to be done, even if I couldn't do it, so I... well, arranged it. It just... doesn't feel like enough now, though. I love you, and I want to help, and it drives me mad that there are things that can't just be fixed. I know they can't, and I understand why, but..." She managed a small laugh. "I'm used to being able to fix things, to understand them or at least explain them... lessons, homework, Neville's fears, Harry's ongoing problems with coping with people, that sort of thing... and it's so frustrating when something comes up that I can't fix or help, because I'm not used to it. And it's worse when it's something that hurts you, because I think I could honestly give up my own left hand if it would make things right for you, and yet all I can do is try to comfort you when the nightmares come, and I can't even do that always..."

He laughed against her shoulder, feeling himself held as closely as if he was something valuable. "Foolish girl - you do so much more than that." She felt him sigh and shiver in her arms. "The worst part - the worst thing in the nightmares isn't the pain it's the - knowing myself to be this worthless, dirty - just a, an empty _thing_ for them to use - that way - without any rights over my own body, without any boundaries I can hold against them because if I try they'll just smash me in harder like a hollow porcelain doll when you hit it with a club which looks horribly - phallic - and it's staved in, it breaks into ten thousand worthless pieces that can never be whole and then I wake up and this - bright, brave girl half my age is holding me in her arms and I can't imagine what I ever did to deserve such a wonderful gift. And she wants me to want her as if - as if what I wanted or didn't want counted for something."

His voice dropped to a shaken whisper. "And when I'm awake - when I'm awake and everybody is treating me like a martyred hero and I _know_ that I'm only faking being a man and really I'm just that crawling, violated thing and I always will be, you make me feel that maybe I'm wrong, that if somebody so - admirable still admires _me_ then maybe I can be a real person again someday, and maybe struggling through the nightmares and trying to stay sane instead of giving in and being what they made me be isn't a totally pointless exercise - that there's some sound reason for keeping going, other than a bloody-minded determination to annoy Lucius. Not," he added, in a sharper and more composed voice, "that annoying Lucius isn't a worthwhile goal in itself, of course."

"A very worthwhile goal," she whispered, pressing her lips to the top of his head. "And oh, I have always believed that killing people was wrong but I will so gladly make an exception for that man if he is in my hands, that I promise you. For hurting you so, for making you believe that you could be tainted by someone so beneath you, so unworthy even to consider himself your equal!" She held him a little tighter, rocking the small, automatic rock that all mothers or nurses learn quickly. "I... don't know if you've thought of this, or if it's any comfort, but there is at least one part of you they could not touch or take away," she said softly. "I know they did hurt your mind as well as your body, it can't be otherwise... but your intellect is exactly as it always was. Your brilliance, your learning... that is yours and yours alone, untouched and undamaged." It would comfort her, she thought, and she wanted desperately to find _something_ to make this less hurtful for him.

He made a small sound which was trying to be a laugh. "Oh, with Pettigrew, some of the others - especially Grab and Coil Senior! - while I still had enough mind left to be aware of anything except pain I could think - I did think - 'It doesn't matter what you do to me, you'll still be ignorant and thick and I'll still be better than you.' But Lucius - Lucius had me already undermined from long ago - he made sure I'd have no defences against him and he could just pick up where he - left off."

She smoothed his hair, kissing the top of his head again. "He is... oh, I don't know words bad enough for what he is," she said fiercely. "That pompous, selfish, cowardly poser... You're worth a hundred of him, Severus, and when I think of him _daring_ to think he had the right to hurt you..." She realized she might be holding on a bit too tightly, and relaxed her grip to hug him more gently, but still very close. "Oh, I wish I could show him to himself as he really is. That would be a fitting punishment... to know how small and petty and worthless he really is, and that everyone knows it but him." She made a thoughtful noise. "I'll go look in the library tomorrow, I'm sure there has to be some way to do it."

"That would be - poetic, if you can do it. But he thinks he has a right to hurt me because I gave him permission, long ago, and he knows he can break me like a bloody straw because he knows I know he knows I really am the fucking damned whore he says I am, because I sold myself to him when I was twelve for a pat on the head and the slim chance of some scrap of protection against bloody Black and bloody, bloody Potter."

Hermione tensed, leaning back to stare down at him in shock. "When you were _twelve_?" she whispered, horrified. "You mean... oh, no..." He tensed in turn, looking away from her with that dreadful guilty, shamed expression, and she hugged him close. "Oh, love, I'm so sorry..." she murmured, rocking him a little. "I knew it had been bad for you, but I didn't know it was that bad... but you were only twelve! You were so far below the age of consent that it's not _funny_, you can't have known what you were getting into... I mean, _I_ was twelve when I started hanging around with Harry and Ron, and bribing them to keep liking me by doing their homework for them, and do you think I deserved to be attacked by basilisks and three-headed dogs and giant chess-men and everything just because the only people I could find willing to look out for me were complete and utter twits?"

He laughed a little at that - he could never not laugh at somebody being rude about Potter. "In fairness Lucius was a child himself, or little more than - he was seventeen. And I did have at least some idea of what I was getting into: a lot of boys - a lot of boys had these sort of relationships, whether they grew up gay or straight, and it was just - it was just something you did, and I was just at that stupid age for getting same-sex crushes and he was - beautiful, and I was so amazed that _anyone_, let alone someone so - dazzling could find me remotely attractive that I let him turn me into his catamite - his creature."

"You are not," she said firmly. "Look at me!" When he did so she held his eyes and, as habit now, lowered her Occlumantic shields so that he might see the belief behind her words if he chose. "Seventeen is well old enough to know better - not even that - Cormac would go after someone that much younger. He tricked you, Severus, he took advantage of you, and that is not your fault. He just wanted you to think it was, because that's what they _all_ do. It's a common trait, among abusers, especially those who abuse children. They do all they can to convince their victims that it's their fault, that they deserve it, because then they won't dare to tell anyone, and it can go on forever.

"And it's a lie, but like all the best lies, it has a tiny grain of truth in it... they can usually get the victim's consent for something, like your wanting protection, and then they twist it all around to make the poor kid think that that means they agreed to _everything_, which makes it their fault..." She trailed off, and smiled a bit ruefully. "I did some reading. Some research. My mum sent me some Muggle books about helping adult survivors of, erm, sexual assault, since wizards don't seem to want to admit things like this even exist, and they included a lot of stuff about child-abuse."

"Do I dare ask whether you told your mother why you wanted the books? Oh, don't worry - I suppose it doesn't matter. In some ways it's easier to have people know - then I don't have to keep pretending to be sane all the time when I don't feel it."

"Don't worry: I told mum there wasn't anything on the subject in the library, and that Madam Pomfrey was sure to need them sooner or later. Which was entirely true, and it's perfectly in character for me to decide that what we need around here is more books about anything and everything... and I don't like to worry her if I can avoid it. It's bad enough she knows there's a war on and I'm in the middle of it."

"But real life is so much messier than books. Idid consent, more or less - I mean, I don't think I ever truly desired him, I wasn't old enough to know what desire felt like except in that dreamy, silly way you girls felt about Gilded-Boy, but I was just so flattered that he would take an interest in something like me."

He gave a sudden wild laugh which even he realized sounded slightly cracked. "And now his son has taken an oath of fealty - to me! - and that just feels so..." He could feel the laughter threatening to turn into something much darker, his mouth twisting into a bitter line as the old pain tried to claw its way out of his throat. "By the time I realized that what Lucius wanted was _power_, that I wasn't going to be given the option of refusing and that my trying to refuse just made him more determined to have me it was too late - I was too ashamed to tell anybody, because they all knew I had consented, at first. Him and his - friends that he let - _They_ know that I consented. That was part of why they - they were angry that I wouldn't still... That I refused them. As an adult. So they took..." He looked down, grimacing. "When they had the chance. Said-said it was all I was good for - all I'd ever been good for."

Hermione frowned in concentration and touched his cheek gently, coaxing him to look up. "Severus... I can imagine how you could. I was... miserable, in first year, and horribly lonely a lot of the time, and if someone had... had seemed to want me, even Lockhart, I don't know for certain that I would have refused. I didn't have anyone really after me, the way you did with Harry's dad, but still..." She shuddered. "God, that's a nasty thought. And of course, the one person I absolutely never would have dared to tell would have been you - I wanted so badly for you to approve of me, and I never, ever would have let you find out I'd done something so bloody stupid."

"I never wanted Lily to find out," he answered with the ghost of a sigh, "and she - didn't."

"If it had happened," Hermione said slowly, struck by a thought, "and you had found out, would you have blamed me? Thought less of me because I was lonely and unhappy and someone took advantage of it?"

He met her eyes then, frowning. "I would have thought that you had been, as you so kindly put it, 'bloody stupid' - but being bloody stupid is an occupational hazard at that age so no, I wouldn't have thought any less of you for it. And I would have made sure that the person who - 'took advantage' - was expelledimmediately, and that their parents knew why.

"I can see what you're doing, you know," he said with a sigh, "and you're right - it probably isn't logical of me to blame myself for having been so - gormless. Twelve is a gormless age, especially in boys. But it's difficult when you - when everybody, all your life - nearly everybody, anyway - tells you you're bad and, and dirty, and 'you should be ashamed'. It's hard not to believe it. And - part of me might have blamed you, even though it would be stupid and irrational to do so - if I had seen myself in you."

He broke eye-contact very deliberately and looked down and to the side, speaking in a whisper. "I hated you, you know. It's a terrible admission, so - stupid and petty, to hate a child, for something that wasn't even her own doing. But you were so like me at that age in so many ways, and as I loathed myself so I loathed you. And although you were so like me, you had so many things I had never had and knew that I would never have - parents who loved you and who could afford to provide for you, friends, support - and you were turning into a swan as I watched, and I knew that I would never be anything except - ugly. I was eaten up with envy every time I looked at you. But you were such a little scrap of a thing, like a poodle-puppy - if somebody had actually physically hurt you I would have thought it was - disgraceful. In them, not in you. Contrary to popular belief, I am not an especially violent man - but I might have made an exception."

She sniffled, kissing the top of his head. "Thank you," she said softly. "I don't blame you, for hating me. I wish I'd known then that it wasn't my fault... I admired you so much, you see, and I wanted you to approve of me and you just _wouldn't_... but I don't blame you a bit. I don't like remembering my first year, either, and mine was far happier than yours.

"And... I've had a few daydreams, you know, about what it would have been like if we'd been at school together. I would have had a desperate crush on you the moment you put your hand up in class, you know - I've so rarely met someone who can actually keep up with me, immodest as that sounds. To find someone who actually enjoyed the reading as much as I did, who was a fellow scruffy little swot... I wish I had been there... although a scruffy Gryffindor following you around might not have helped much. But I might have been able to help, and you must have needed someone so badly." She touched his cheek, coaxing him to look at her. "I would have fallen just as hard for you then as I did now," she told him seriously. "And if I had known a tenth of what you were going through, I would have charged in to fight for you - probably whether you wanted me to or not. I'm not prone to acting without thinking, usually, but when someone I care about gets hurt..."

He gave her an affectionate squeeze, as far as he was able to with one hand, and then disengaged himself gently from her grasp and lowered himself awkwardly down to lie back against the pillows, gazing up at her seriously. Solemn and sad though he was, Hermione noted clinically that at least his eyes no longer had the dead, empty look which they had worn for as long as she had known him, and which she now knew - thanks to the books which her mother had so obligingly provided - was a known symptom of deep psychological trauma and stress.

"Thank you" he said quietly. "I did have... Lily, Potter's mother, she was my friend as you know, and a Gryffindor, but she was... I was her acolyte, I think, not her equal. Never her equal." Hermione opened her mouth to protest, to tell him that he was worthy, but he overrode her. "We were - she was my best friend but I'm not sure that I was hers, she had... other interests, other friends, she didn't - I couldn't depend on her support. And so I fell in with - with people I thought could protect me from the Marauders, but then there was nobody to protect me fromthem!"

He gave her the ghost of a smile. "I can't imagine how much better - how _incredibly_ better my life would have been at that age if I'd had someone who really was reliably on my side, and wasn't just trying to use me, or barely tolerating me. And the idea of the twelve-year-old Brain of Gryffindor duffing up Lucius Malfoy is curiously attractive - especially as he never was much good in a duel. He's like Gilded-Boy - all hot air and bluster and Good Hair. You would probably have wiped the floor with him. I'd have done it myself if he hadn't got me so - cowed and hypnotized."

He sighed and pulled a dour face. "But if you had told me that you actually liked me I probably would have thought you were just winding me up - and what would you have done if I'd been - horrible to you?"

"If you...?"

Severus blinked as if he was in danger of crying, and smiled a tight, self-mocking smile. "Once, when Potter and Black were being - especially cruel, Lily stepped in and tried to defend me. But I was a coward, I was afraid to have Rosier and that lot see a M - a Muggle-born save me when I couldn't save myself, they would have taken it out of my hide every bloody night, and besides I had developed this - tremendous, hopeless crush on her, and I was so angry and humiliated at having her see me stripped to my underwear and hung up like a - well, you're a bright girl, I'm sure you can imagine that after what Lucius and his cronies... my sense of my own dignity was very - touchy, and I lost my temper and was very horrible to her indeed" he finished, with a brittle false lightness of tone. "And that, as they say, was that as far as our friendship went - not that I think she would have put up with me for much longer anyway. Realistically."

"I would have utterly adored you, if you'd let me," Hermione said softly, touching his cheek and smiling down at him. "And if you'd been horrible... I probably would have done what I usually do, which involves losing my temper, telling you at great length what an idiot you are and how stupid I obviously am to like you so much, then going off to cry. Which, I should hope, would have given you something of a clue that I actually meant it. And believe me, even a whiff of a hint at an apology and I would have forgiven you everything in a moment. I'm pitifully easy to appease, really, although Ron never did work that one out - he loathes apologizing." She kissed the tip of his nose gently.

"And I'm sorry, that you had to go through that... had I been there, I assure you, I would have made Potter and Black wish they'd never got up that morning, whether you were nasty to me about it or not. Especially Sirius, who I'm really glad I got the chance to kick in a sensitive place just once before he died. Which sounds horrible, but I REALLY disliked that man." She smiled ruefully. "I know it's silly, but I'm feeling rather jealous of Lily Evans, just now. I know how pretty she was... I probably wouldn't have been able to compete, had we all been at school at the same time."

"I did talk to Albus about Black - about why he was never punished for trying to kill me - and he confirmed what Minerva said about it: that they both believed Black to be seriously mentally ill, exacerbated by his breach with his family. Which is no proper excuse on Albus's part, since he neither explained this to me at the time nor did anything sensible to protect me or anyone else from what amounted to a homicidal maniac - but it does explain a great deal about Black himself, if true.

"And Lily - she was beautiful, and more than that she was nice, and we were joint top of the class in Potions and until that - ghastly day we had been good friends, even if - even if I always loved her a lot more than she loved me. She was somebody I could _talk_ to. We met when we were just children, the only two wizarding children in town, and later...

"The four of us, Lily and me, James and Sirius, we were the four top students in our year and I thought, I thought when I was new and naïve that maybe we could all... That we could - discuss things. Potions, spells... but Potter and Black, they had brains of a sort but they got good marks in order to get good marks, you understand, not because they cared about what they were studying, and they thought that my desire to go on thinking about my studies outside the classroom was - ridiculous. Literally, to be ridiculed.

"But Lily - there was a spark in her. She wanted to _know_, as I did. But she was too... She was my girl on a pedestal, you understand, to be worshipped and lusted after from afar even when I was standing next to her. Even though we were friends, apart from Potions we didn't really have much in common - the fact that she was nice should tell you that much! - and she was very - popular. A socialite." He said the word as if it referred to an embarrassing and probably illegal vice. "Even though she tried to stay friends for old times' sake, I knew I was just a sort of a, a stiff, black shadow among her rainbow of friends, always awkward, not fitting in... Whereas you and I, I think, could have fitted in with each other and let the rest of the school go hang. You could have been what I always wanted and never got, just - somebody to have a laugh with, without worrying if I was doing it right. Somebody I could be open with, who wouldn't disapprove of me all the time. Maybe even someone who would invite me to stay with them during the holidays, and not expect me to pay for the privilege with sexual favours - unless I wanted to - which in your case, I probably would, of course."

"If I didn't know better, Severus Snape, I'd think you were being sweet on purpose." She lay down beside him and curled against him, sighing contentedly. "I would have been perfectly happy to let the rest of the world go hang, if it wished, if I'd had you. And we could have stood up for each other, whenever we were too afraid to stand up for ourselves. That would have been nice." She paused for a moment. "And... speaking of visits during the holidays," she said tentatively. "I can't actually invite you home, since I'm not allowed to go there either just now... but I would like you to meet my parents. It's going to come as a bit of a shock to them... they've almost given up on me dating... but I'd like them to meet you."

"And it will give them such a thrill, to find out that you've taken up with a, a scarred, maimed cripple twice your age, who was - far on the wrong side of plain to begin with. Oh yes, and who screams all bloody night unless someone holds him - and sometimes, even if they do. Won't this be fun?"

"Oh, the loss of limb won't bother them so much... I know Adrian mentioned it, it's a lot more common with Muggles. We're more prone to scarring, too, without healing potions and ointments and the like. They know there's a war on, and they know what war does to people... they'll be upset and concerned for you, but they won't... _flinch_ the way wizards do. They'll be more concerned about you being my teacher so recently than anything else... Wizards may not like to think about nasty things like an older person abusing the trust of a younger one, but it's a major concern to Muggles. Still, given your current condition, it's not as if you could have jumped me." She snuggled a bit more. "I'm not saying they'll be thrilled, but I love you, and I love them, and I want you to at least meet each other. And I do think you could all get to like each other, as long as neither you nor mum gets a fit of the sulks. She's worse than you about that."

"I can virtually guarantee that I could out-sulk your mother if I put my mind to it. But it would be... unusual, to be a guest in someone's home, outside of Hogwarts, and be welcome."

"They might be a bit wary, at first... but I've been telling them about you for years... about how you cruelly insist on making me do my very best, instead of letting me coast along on my intellect, and how you've always rescued us when we needed it, and everything. Aside from the potential sullying of their innocent daughter, they're going to be quite happy about meeting you. And if they find out that you actually _don't_ want me to rush heedlessly into danger alongside Harry and Ron, I think they'll forgive you any sullying in fairly short order."

"If you've been telling them about me for years in that bouncy, bushy-tailed tone they probably worked out that you fancied me madly years ago, but were too polite to comment. Though why you should is still a mystery to me."

"Oh, god... they probably do know, don't they? I never thought... well, I suppose it'll come as less of a shock, then. Embarrassing though it bloody well is - I thought I hid it so well!" Although now that she thought about it, her parents had seemed oddly... cheerful about listening to her talk about her Potions classes. Good god, they'd probably thought it was cute. Well, seeing him would cure them of THAT, at least.

The object of her eccentric affection frowned at her, although he looked glumly thoughtful rather than annoyed. "What concerns me is - you said that you didn't tell them the real reason why you wanted books about... about the after-effects of - of what they - because you didn't want them to know how - unpleasant our private little wizard-war can get. And losing limbs, even the, the screaming could be the result of regular warfare rather than torture. But how do we explain these?" He raised his hand and touched one of the thin but still noticeable scars which ran from the corners of his mouth back to his jaw. "In the short term I could hide them with a glamour, or even grow a beard: but in the long term that would seem... deceitful."

"As far as the, the books and everything go, you don't have to tell them, if you don't want to. I certainly would never have told them without asking you first. If you'd rather they didn't know all of what happened to you, then that's your decision. But... in the long term, I think you're right. We shouldn't try to hide things from them. Have I mentioned that I love you beyond all sense and reason?" She kissed him, entirely unable to get rid of her silly smile any other way. Long term. That was a promising phrase...

"'Beyond all sense' is right" he muttered, kissing her back - "at least anyone looking at us will think that my own affections are more - explicable, and no-one will think I've taken leave of my senses for - loving - such a lovely - " and he covered his own embarrassment by kissing her again, slowly and with feeling although not, he thought distractedly, as much feeling as he would have liked, given that she was wearing a one-piece nightgown which resisted his attempt to slide his hand around her bare ribs. When he was done and they had both got their breath back he rolled over onto his back, staring at the ceiling.

"As for the rest of it, I'm not going to bloody-well walk in and announce 'By the way, I recently spent four months being - being gang-raped, so don't worry if you touch me unexpectedly and find me curled up in a sobbing ball at your feet', but if it comes up in conversation I'm not going to deny it, and I don't need you to do so. In a way, it's easier if people know and get over it, instead of feeling them bloody _speculating_ behind my back every time someone touches me unexpectedly and I start shaking, and I'm trying hard to learn to behave as if - as if I wasn't ashamed of it. But I'm afraid they may be very - distressed to find out how very unpleasant the threat which you and they are facing is: and since they're already taking all possible precautions to protect themselves, and they can do nothing at all to protect you, it might be unkind to disturb them."

He sighed, turning to face her again and tucking his face down against her shoulder. "But the only way - in the long term - to protect them from such knowledge would either be to deceive them or never to go near them, and - I know 'Meet the parents' is supposed to be every boy's nightmare but it would be so nice to do something so, so normal and so social and not feel like a freak or an interloper."

"You'll be welcomed, I promise... even if my dad does have to have the obligatory 'if you hurt my daughter' warning talk. And... I'd like it, too. To do something normal, instead of swinging between fighting for my life, struggling with my homework, and trying to keep Harry from falling to bits or exploding - he's almost as nervy as you, sometimes. I'd like to do something... that's normal, and... and happy." She cuddled him against her, kissing the top of his head. "We'll see what happens, I suppose... if it comes up, we'll tell them. If not, maybe it can wait a while. We have time for you to build up to trusting them, if you want to."

She paused, and smiled against his untidy hair. "I'm lovely and beloved, am I?" she murmured. "That is... very nice to hear. Almost as nice as knowing you're considering the long term with me..."

"I thought I - hated you before," he said drowsily, "because you had everything I wanted and could never have. But now I have you, and all the rest of it - friendship, family, _companionship_ - all that apparently comes with you. And it doesn't matter if I'm still - a bit of an ugly duckling, because you're a, a swan - or a very nice fluffy handsome grown-up brown duck - and you're beautiful enough for both of us. You're my circle of firelight, and I've come to warm myself in you."

Hermione's eyes filled up, and she swallowed hard and kissed him gently. "I love you," she whispered. "And I will always be here, to warm you and protect you... and I quite like being a duck, but if you ever tell anyone I got sentimental over it I'll be very annoyed."

"...wouldn't dream of it." He really did sound almost asleep, now. "I'll protect you too, when I'm well. It's a long time too late to worry about - about what happened when we were children, but there's still plenty of time to fit in with each other, and let the rest of the world go hang."

"Sounds wonderful to me." She kissed his forehead lightly as he drifted into sleep. "Sweet dreams, beloved."

A faint hope, still... but she always said it.

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**Author's note:**

The title is from the song _Venus in Furs_ by the group Velvet Underground. The song overall is rather unsuitable, as it is based on a famous S&M novel of the same name; but certain lines of it seemed to fit Snape in this story very well. _I am tired, I am weary; // I could sleep for a thousand years. // A thousand dreams that would awake me// Different colours made of tears._

The expression "of the first water", meaning "of the highest quality", is said to be derived from the gem trade, where "the first water" refers to diamonds of the greatest, most water-like clarity.

Rongorongo is a mysterious script used on Easter Island up until some time in the nineteenth century: Muggles have been unable to decipher it.

Lucius's behaviour as described here was definitely abusive, of course, but Severus hasn't got used to thinking of it that way yet.

We are not told exactly where Hermione kicked Sirius during the brawl in the Shrieking Shack in PoA - but we pointedly_aren't_ told, and it made him let go of Harry and roll up, so it was probably somewhere painful.

Personally I (**whitehound**) think that Lily as revealed in DH was rather an unpleasant girl, but Severus hasn't realized that yet, and Hermione doesn't have enough information yet to form an opinion.

Well, there it is. The next couple of chapters are mostly already written, and should be out much faster, although the new canon background regarding the Deathly Hallows makes it even harder than it already was to work out how the progress of the war overlaps with Severus's private progress from horror back to health.

I must say, though, that I was a bit disturbed to find several of our regular and enthusiastic reviewers expressing equal enthusiasm about a story in which Snape himself briefly becomes a torturer (albeit with a lot of provocation), and saying how in character they thought Snape was in that particular incident. It did rather make me wonder how they could square agreeing with that version of Snape with, apparently, also agreeing with ours - and whether we were failing to get the point across. Torture is wrong whoever is doing it: it doesn't suddenly become OK if it's Our Side that's wielding the knife, or if the torturer had a justified grudge against their victim.


	23. 20 In Loco Parentis

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

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**20: IN _LOCO PARENTIS_**

Apologies for the long delay in updating, but I (the **whitehound** bit of **Borolin**) had to move house rather suddenly due to the death of my landlord, which occupied all my time for several months, plus **Loose Canon**, the Yahoo-based Potterverse discussion-group I mod, was fantastically busy during June and July. Normal service should now be resumed I hope (not that normal service is all that fast).

Also profound apologies to people whose reviews I haven't answered, but at this point if I answered all the reviews I'd never get any actual story written. Now that things are back on a fairly even keel, I hope to be able to reply more reliably in future.

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As her kisses trailed lower across his stomach he put two fingers under her chin and stopped her, tilting her face up to look at her very seriously. "Are you quite sure - absolutely sure you want to do this? It's not - I really, really don't want you doing anything you don't feel - comfortable with, just because you feel - obligated, especially - " He shut his eyes and flinched, jerking his head as if he was trying to shake off memory. "Not a good thing to have to do if you don't - want to" he finished hoarsely.

"But I do want to" Hermione said firmly. "So long as that doesn't disturb you. If you want me to stop, of course, I will - but the books said this was an art-form, giving scope for a great deal of skill and variation, and that if it was done well it was probably the most intense pleasure you could give to a male lover. And I told you, I mean to be as good at making love as I am at Arithmancy."

"It's faintly unnerving to be seen as a - practical exam project" he said palely, "but if you're truly sure you want to, who am I to stand in the way of the advancement of academic knowledge? Provided you let me - return the favour afterwards. I don't want to feel that I am - taking one-sided advantage of your... thirst for knowledge." Or any other kind of thirst. Damn!

"If you want to make sure the feeling is mutual - literally - you could show me during," she said cheerfully. "Right now I want to be able to - to concentrate without distraction, but once I'm sure I know what I'm doing it's quite possible to, well, face opposite ways and do it both ways at once."

"Good Lord" he said faintly. "Where did Miss Butter-Wouldn't-Melt Granger learn about _that_?" He wriggled involuntarily, and rather wished his treacherous subconscious hadn't brought up the image of _anything_ melting in her mouth. He was trying to be responsible here, damnit, and it didn't help his image to appear to be as eager as an untried teenager. Even if he was. And she was.

"From a book, of course. There were pictures."

"You'll have to - show them to me later" he sighed, lying back and giving up any attempt at resistance.

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Being treated as a research project might be somewhat unromantic but he wasn't sure he could have coped with romance right now, in any case. And every time his acute awareness of what the wicked, wonderful little chit was doing with her tongue dragged up the memory of the taste of sweaty unwashed flesh, or the taste of - blank it out, blank it out - the feeling of fingers twisted into his hair as he gagged and struggled and Pettigrew's voice in the background jeering and cat-calling - or worse, later, not struggling at all but submitting numbly, almost thankfully to a routine humiliation which was at least not painful - every time, her bright, breezy, slightly muffled voice demanding to know if she was doing _this_ or _this_ right brought him back with a pleasurable jolt to a present in which trauma warred with libido, and libido appeared to be winning.

By the time he noticed the faint trace of her mental contact, and realized that she was actually watching his mind and distracting him from his dark thoughts quite deliberately, he was too grateful, and too dreamily adrift in pleasure, to be seriously annoyed. And after all, it was admirably Slytherin of her to prove she cared by manipulating him - in one sense or another.

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Merlin knew, he had enough dark thoughts to be distracted from. The loyalty of his Slytherin guard was now assured, though he was disgruntled at the idea that it even needed to be: Greengrass's treachery, though in some ways understandable, had only served to reinforce the other houses' stereotypic idea of Slytherins as self-serving and base, even though the blasted girl had acted out of family pride and a genuine if warped romantic valour. Just as he had been, he knew it, filled with reckless pride and a dark sense of glamour when he had pledged himself to Tom Riddle, before he learned that that glamour was a gorgeous thin veneer pasted over something rotten, stinking of the abattoir.

Now valour and pride and glamour and a fatal, nihilistic romanticism had led more than half of his Slytherins to brand themselves with the sign of their loyalty to a ruined cripple. He knew, intellectually, that the delicate blue-green hound wouldn't actually _do_ anything to a child who broke faith with him, except to disappear; he should not fear that they were pledging themselves to die for him or die of failing him. Yet the sincerity and fervour many of them had shown was terrifying - their lives now his responsibility twice over. He wasn't sure which unnerved him more - Bennet's open vitriol or Battersby's worshipful, wide-eyed devotion - but at least he wouldn't have to face either of them again until after Easter.

Nor would he have to face Parvati Patil, who had taken the opportunity to return home to be with her parents, even though she was Hindu and Easter itself was an irrelevance to her. He dreaded her return to Hogwarts on one level, but that was as nothing to the fear that she might not return at all - that because of him she might fail to sit her NEWTs.

He was shamefully glad that it was Horace as acting Head of House, not himself, who had had to deal with Daphne Greengrass's parents; yet he knew that he ought to write to them even so. He was the one who had overseen her education for six years, who had been - God help them both - in _loco parentis_ to her.

Sixteen years ago, or even four, although it might as well have been millennia ago, he had wanted to see Sirius Black sent to the Dementors, for his (supposed) treachery to Lily and to his own supposed best friend, and for his (supposed) casual murder of a streetful of Muggles. Somehow he had not hated Pettigrew, when he learned of his guilt, one half as much as he had hated Black - Pettigrew had been an outsider, a hanger-on, he had never been Lily's trusted friend to the degree that Black had been and it had been easy to believe that he had betrayed her out of fear, not malice, until Severus had found himself at Pettigrew's mercy and learned that he had none. None at all.

If he could feed Pettigrew to the Dementors he would and be glad of it, he thought, not out of cruelty or even for revenge but because the idea of sharing the same planet, breathing the same atmosphere as his torturer made his skin crawl. He had tried desperately to push the man away from him when he could not, and he still wanted him away, gone, as far from him as he could be. But somehow he could not feel the same about Greengrass and Patil, and when he thought of what their futures must be now he felt only sorrow and heaviness, and the shame of having failed to prevent their corruption, as Horace had failed to prevent his.

Two young lives worse than lost, given over to long suffering and a miserable death in the dark and cold of Azkaban - and for what? When Hermione told him he was of some value he could nearly almost believe it, at least for as long as her bright eyes were on him, but that sense of self-worth was still fragile, a house of cards which could collapse at a breath, and when he was in that mood the sea-green hound which stood poised at gaze on the back of his godson's hand only reinforced the sense that he was unworthy of so much devotion.

Tightening his lips, he accepted the quill which Draco had fetched for him, took a deep breath and began to write. _To Alexander and Roberta Greengrass, my respectful greetings. It was with great regret that I learned..._

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"I've been wondering," he said quietly to Albus, watching the candlelight sparkling on the ancient, two-handled golden chalice and on the badger engraved around the bowl of it. "A pity, as Pomona says, to destroy such a relic..."

"I agree - a great pity. But..." The old man sighed. "I've been through the books, as you have, and I can find no way to destroy the Horcrux without destroying its vessel."

"But what is in the books is only what was in the minds of their writers, some of whom were patently drooling. What I was wondering was - well - what happens if we feed the Horcrux to a Dementor?"

"That's - not a bad idea, actually, and at least, any defensive curses which there may be on it..."

"...would happen to the Dementor, not to us. And I refuse to feel guilty about what happens to one of those bastard things, quite apart from the fact that most curses can't even touch them."

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"But this is great!" Adrian exclaimed with real enthusiasm. "I mean not great that you were attacked, leik, but I go off for less than a week and come back and find you walking properly! Nearly properly."

"'Properly' is an overstatement," Severus muttered, grasping at the mantlepiece to prevent himself from overbalancing, "but it's such sheer bloody relief to be able to get to the lavvy by myself, I can't tell you."

"I'll bet," the young doctor said sympathetically - and at the moment he _was_ a doctor and not a surgeon, as Severus understood it, since he was mid-way through his house physician placement, and not enjoying it much. "And you'll find your balance will improve with practice, leik."

"Suddenly you are an expert on magical prostheses?" Severus said sourly, letting go of the mantle and willing himself steady.

"Not a bit of it," the younger man replied cheerfully, "but I know that even in my world, tin legs are so good now that for a lot of people that need them, well, 'disabled' isn't the word any more, or that horrible 'differently abled' - they're just, well, 'artificially assisted', but _with_ the artificial assistance they can do the lot, and so will you. And even people who have to use wheels - well, the reason they judge the wheelies in the London Marathon in a separate class and don't let them compete directly against runners is because it wouldn't be fair to the runners, because the wheelies are always faster..."

"I'll settle for being able to climb a bloody staircase - especially in this place."

"It'll come - you're doing great, you know that." He rubbed his pink palms together gleefully. "This calls for a celebration. Can the house-elves do wine, do you think?"

The spring weather was surprisingly clement and now, while most of the students were safely out of the way, it seemed like a golden opportunity for Severus to venture outside and get a little air. At least, it did to Adrian, who insisted on organising a picnic lunch, and Severus was at least grudgingly prepared to go along with it. The safe womb of his own rooms was starting to seem as much dull as reassuring, except when Hermione was in them with him when they could - he was prepared to allow - get fairly exciting.

Hermione was to be at the picnic, and Neville and Draco and even Potter, although Luna had returned to her father after extracting a promise that Severus would Floo-call her if he needed her. They kept it quiet and did not tell too many other people what they planned for Severus realised, even though he still didn't quite understand it, that they would all want to come, and the thought was rather overwhelming. But Anwar and Henessey for the Slytherin guard had been stationed on watch with their own individual packed lunches, and they brought Rolanda, representing the older generation, both as a body-guard and as Severus's physical trainer.

"That's it! - I knew you could do it" she said brightly. "Try, try and try again." Severus shot her a forbidding glower, which only made her grin. As he made his unsteady way down the lawn he knew that she had, aggravatingly, been right, though he was still glad to have herself and Adrian at either elbow, ready to steady him if he slipped on the damp grass. The prostheses now felt, convincingly, like real feet, but they felt like real feet which had gone slightly to sleep, and he had still needed magical assistance to manage the stairs, both indoors and out.

When he saw where the house-elves had set out their spread, though, he stopped so suddenly that Adrian nearly cannoned into him. The table-cloth was laid out under the great beech at the edge of the lake but he could see Potter gesticulating at the tree, explaining something to the other three, and he cringed internally.

"What is it?" Adrian said quietly.

"Nothing."

After a moment Potter picked his way across the grass towards them, looking even more indignant and rumpled than usual.

"I told them you wouldn't want to sit - "

"That will be enough, Potter." He took a deep breath and reminded himself of his resolution not to be aggressive unless the boy offended him on purpose. "You are quite correct, however. Ordinarily I would have preferred - another location. But the house-elves' logic is unimpeachable: I can't bloody walk much farther." He could have got as far as the green bank a little further on but that would be worse; that was where _she_ had sat, giggling with her Gryffindor girl-friends.

Forcing himself into motion again, he lurched the final fifty yards and then folded down, with Rolanda's assistance, at the edge of the chequered tablecloth. Hermione shunted up to sit next to him, although she couldn't snuggle too openly when neither Harry, Rolanda nor Adrian was aware of the nature of their relationship.

The house-elves had laid out a beautiful spread, with proper china which was tastefully arranged around the slumbering form of Crookshanks, and wineglasses in a little hamper for later. Severus accepted the cup of tea which Draco had poured for him and prepared himself to close his mind to the memory of what had happened here but Rolanda, with her hawk eyes, noticed his continued unease and said quietly, "If you want to move, Severus, I can levitate you - that's not a problem."

By Rolanda's standards, that was tactful, but it punctured the bubble of his composure even so and set the past rising in his throat like nausea. He had swallowed the bitter acid of it all his life but he was too much weakened, his control had been eroded and the worst of it was, he couldn't even conceal the fact that his hand was shaking, as the teacup he was holding rattled noisily against its saucer. All their eyes were on him, even the cat's, as if they thought he was about to explode. "Severus..." Hermione began, taking the cup from his unsteady grasp before he could scald himself, and suddenly the words came spilling out in a dark flood he could not contain and did not really want to.

"I never - I never did anything to them to start it, just said I wanted to be in Slytherin and that was it, I was a target from then on, they could see that I was - poor, an outsider, _common_ and I was friends with a girl and that was bloody enough. I was _Snivellus_ to them from my first bloody day, they never let me alone, they hounded me until I wanted to die, they fucking _tried_ to kill me and they kept on, and on, always four of them and only one of me and they never, never let me alone always chasing, jeering, hexing -" They were watching him, stricken; Hermione placed her hand on his arm but he shrugged it off, too raw to be touched and he wanted to lash out, he knew it was unworthy but he wanted to hurt Potter as a proxy for his father, he wanted the boy to at least understand, in the father's stead, what the father had done.

"Even when they - even on those rare occasions when they let me alone, usually because they were persecuting some other poor bastard, I could never - I couldn't _relax_ because I always had to wonder if they were going to come after me. I still had to be afraid, all the bloody time. Almost nobody stood up to them, they knew too much, they spied on people with the surveillance spells they put into that bloody map, they hexed anybody who crossed them but that was all right because Potter and Black were the golden boys, they had the manner, the money, they were _good at games_ - in more than one fucking sense - and so they were able to get away with it."

He was peripherally aware of his godson looking increasingly uneasy about a description which fitted himself fairly well, but Draco had only ever been a bully _manqué_. "The staff tried to control them, sometimes, but nobody dared to give them away, not even me and I was so - bloody - afraid all the time, I fell in with anybody I thought could protect me. I was so... when I first learned about Hogwarts I thought it was a way out, a place where I could be safe and I longed for it, for the magic the, the wonder of it so bloody much, but thanks to them, to the Marauders, I learned to feel so _sick_ with dread at the very sight of this place." Yet he had still feared home too: they had closed off his hope of escape and left the whole world one vast trap. "My whole - my whole interaction with the magical world was coloured by them. _Dis_coloured" he said to Potter's watching eyes, and the boy inclined his head, a small gesture of acknowledgement.

"The bloody climax, the highlight, was fifth year when James Potter got an award for saving me from a trap he'd helped to set up and then he and Black hung me up and stripped me and forced me to eat soap in front of half the fucking school - they were sitting here, right here under this _bloody_ tree - and she, Lily, she tried to save me but it was all such a mess and I was so, so bloody _scared_ and so humiliated that I lashed out at her, I insulted her and she - here, on this spot, that was the end, she wouldn't take me back even though I begged and pleaded, she turned on me and joined in with them, jeering at me -"

"Then that was very silly of her," Neville's clear voice said firmly, and Severus froze with his mouth open as though someone had flung a bucket of water over him. He had thought of Lily as many things, but "silly" hadn't been one of them. "Everybody knows," Longbottom continued composedly, "that if a, a cat or a dog is scared it'll take a hack at you even if usually it likes you and it's the same with people and it's daft to get all aereated about it, it really is. You called me a lot of things when you were... but it didn't bother me once I knew you were - upset, like."

"That's..." He wanted to say that it was an intelligent observation, but that would mean admitting that Lily had been a long way less than perfect. Was that true? Had Lily at sixteen indeed been both less kind and less socially aware than Longbottom at seventeen? Almost unconsciously he reached out and gave Hermione's hand a brief squeeze, to make up for having shrugged her off, and she gave him a quick, tight smile in return.

"I didn't know that she - " Potter muttered. "I mean, I knew that you... but I didn't know that you apologised later, and she wouldn't accept it. That was - a bit harsh."

"I crawled to her, nearly literally, and she looked at me with such - contempt -" He had crawled and pleaded and been met with scorn more recently, many times, but Lily's contempt was still the most cutting of all. He fixed his gaze on the boy, hoping to be understood and it was something, after all, to see those green eyes, her eyes, look at him without hatred after six years of loathing for which he himself was, he knew, not entirely blameless. "I know I - I realise now that I may have made Hogwarts unpleasant for you in turn, although God knows, you gave me provocation..."

"You did, yes," Potter said calmly. "And for Neville. But Neville and me, we only had to put up with you sniping twice a week, you didn't, uh, follow us around except when I was somewhere I wasn't s'posed to be. And you didn't actually hex people, as such."

Severus nodded and dropped his gaze, feeling depressed. "They destroyed me, you know," he said quietly. "My whole life... I wouldn't have fallen in with Lucius in the first place if they hadn't made me feel so in need of protection, I would probably never have mixed with that crowd, become a Death Eater - I wouldn't have lost Lily if it hadn't been for them, I would never have become so - so _bitter_ or so fucking afraid, I wouldn't have become so - so harsh as a teacher if I hadn't had to start off by teaching students who had seen me being stripped and - " He started to shudder again, uncontrollably.

"I can never, never be free of them, my whole fucking life is _infested_ by them, it would, it would have to be Pettigrew, one of them, who crippled me and turned me into - " He gestured helplessly, indicating the scars, the prostheses, the less visible but deeper psychological and sexual damage - "This."

Adrian's charcoal-dark hand reached out at the edge of his vision and gripped his false forearm over the spot where the Dark Mark had once been; rather awkwardly, for the boy was left-handed but their relative positions meant he had to reach out with his right. "And now you're here," the singsong Geordie voice said softly, "with _your_ friends, and it's your tree if you want it, leik. Their gang didn't last, did it, one way or another. Yours is better."

Severus drew a deep breath, and another, and forced himself to raise his head and face them. But there was nothing to face, really. No-one looked amused, or scornful, only concerned and - amazingly - fond. Potter was frowning but his green eyes were clear and he knew that the anger on that face was for James, not for him. The leaves unfurling on the old tree were the same clear green, the colour of Lily's eyes, the surface of the lake was sparkling beyond it and he did not have to be the Marauders' hunted victim any more - not even Pettigrew's. He did not have to be an outsider any more, if only he could get through the glass bubble of awkwardness and embarrassment which he himself had caused by his outburst.

Crookshanks rolled over, yawning, reached out one vast, orange paw and snaffled a potted shrimp. Hermione made a little huffing noise of amusement and the bubble burst - Draco uncoiled and began to pour him a fresh cup of tea as the hound on the back of his hand wagged its tail happily, and Potter picked up a plate of sandwiches and held them out to him, smiling.

"Try the fish-paste ones - they're really good."

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He had been raised Catholic, and he knew that he should go to mass now, at Easter of all times. Now he should go to see the candles burning through the long vigil of the night, and hear the soul-shaking words of the Exultet. But he could not take communion in a state of mortal sin, unconfessed; and nor could he confess that what he was doing with Hermione, all unwed as they were, was a mortal sin and say, with sincerity, that he wished to stop doing it.

Besides, he might be able to walk, after a fashion, but going to a church, leaving the school grounds, was still far too much to contemplate and he could hardly ask a priest to come here especially for him, and then not even confess or take communion. So he would go, wavering and unsteady, to the ecumenical service in the little chapel at the foot of the north wall, presided over by the Episcopalian minister from Hogsmeade, and keep on sinning.

Not that he even truly believed any more that it _was_ a sin, that was the thing. If he had thought that it was, then he might have confessed, done penance, tried to resist - but he had seen far too much of how viciously the sexual urge could be warped and misused to believe that a roll in the metaphorical hay between two consenting lovers who were neither of them pledged to anybody else could be anything seriously wrong.

He still worried about the look of the thing, about what Albus and Minerva would have to say about it if they knew, let alone the _Prophet_. But he no longer feared that he might truly be taking advantage of Hermione's navety - indeed, he worried that he was letting her do too much of the work, although her enthusiastic desire to perfect her new skills was hard to resist.

In abstract, the idea of being in another person's sexual power again was terrifying, and if he had thought about it in advance he might have expected that he would prefer to be the more active partner. But he wanted even less to feel that someone else was in his power, or that he might indeed be taking advantage - and in practice Hermione's happy enthusiasm was so very unthreatening and clean that he was for the most part happy to lie back and think of Scotland, with the _proviso_ that he was going to return the favour when he was a little stronger and a little more comfortable in his own skin.

Even with all the lapsed Catholic guilt and the beaten-in self-doubt in the world, he could not think that this dalliance was a mortal sin which would cut him off from God, if his other sins had not already done so: especially since the priest had taught his childhood self that the reason pre-marital sex was wrong was because it showed that the man was selfishly and lovelessly taking advantage of a woman who would rather have remained "pure", which was based on the Victorian idea that women had little or no sex-drive of their own, which demonstrably was not the case.

It was not as if any prospective future partner would expect Hermione to be a virgin - "waiting" had not been in fashion in Britain during his lifetime - although he found, increasingly, that the idea of her with some future partner who was not himself was one he did not wish to contemplate.

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Hermione and Draco came with him, for the company, although Hermione's family were a mixture of Quakers and Jews and not very enthusiastic in either direction. The Malfoys, like many pure-bloods of French or Norman French origin, belonged, insofar as they belonged to any religion, to the Triumvirate Communion, a Christian offshoot who believed that the three Magi had been genuine wizards, and the founding fathers of their sect. The little chapel, built when the castle was first remade in stone in about Eleven Hundred, was in the Norman perpendicular style and had been designed to serve a Norman Triumvirate community, but it possessed ceremonial equipment suitable for several Christian sects and a variety of other faiths, and the designs on walls and windows were adaptable to suit the occasion.

The last time Severus had been here had in fact been a Bar Mitzvah celebration for Horowitz, the Slytherin Potions star, which Severus had helped to organise, since the boy had no parents and was terrified of his aunt. That had been only two days before the Death Eater attack in which Severus was taken, and since his house father's return from hell the poor little brute had been racked by dreams of torment and decay. But now he was wearing a green hound on his shoulder, and his Dreamless Sleep habit and the nightmares which sparked it seemed to have improved as Severus himself did.

Tonight, the banners and the stained glass had reverted to Mediaeval Christian imagery, and the golden lion on the altar cloth was acting out being an avatar of St Mark rather than a Torah embellishment. The tiny chapel was set into the circular base of the North Tower, so that its windows commanded views in several directions, and the setting sun shone in through the deep blues and greens of the glass and scattered its colour across the congregants. And Severus waited, with his friends either side of him, as darkness fell and the great Paschal candle was lit and brought in. He joined with the prayers and it was easy, his roughened voice resonated and soared as if it had never been damaged although he was aware that Hermione and Draco to either side were both slightly squeaky, and the minister's own ringing voice spoke of how God had come to save His creatures from danger and despair.

As he made his way unsteadily with the rest to light his own individual candle from that greater one at the stroke of midnight, and the minister raised his arms in exultation and cried out "Christ is risen!", Severus felt the power of the older magic, the magic of earth and blood and sacrifice which had taken his Lils and turned her into something like a guardian goddess, striking up through the stone flags and coursing in his veins. And when the sunrise glinting through the gold and blue of the east window brought the long vigil to an end, and he staggered back to his bed to collapse alongside his godson and sleep the day through, he knew with every fibre of his battered soul that what he and Hermione had been doing had not cut him off from holiness and that grace, whatever grace was, was still somewhere within his reach.

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"There is one thing" Hermione said idly, trailing her fingertips up under the hem of Severus's nightshirt and along the bony length of his thigh. "At least when it's my night - and now that we've progressed to... hands-on experience - " she said, matching her actions to her words, finding what she was looking for and smoothing her cool palm around and along the lovely hard/live warmth of him, "you won't need ten minutes on your own first thing in the morning any more."

Severus flopped over onto his back with his hand behind his head, feeling suddenly ridiculously happy and frivolous and young. "I concur entirely - twenty minutes in company sounds like a _far_ better idea."

"Thirty at weekends, even."

"Why limit yourself? If you arrange the shifts right, we could have four hours..." He sighed and shifted as she rubbed the backs of her fingers along a sensitive vein. "Definitely well on your way to earning an Outstanding, I think - but you need to get in as much practice as possible."

"Four hours sounds about right to me... and I assure you, I intend to keep practising until 'outstanding' is no longer applicable and you have to come up with a new mark for my perfection." She gave him an angelic look. "Of course, then I'll have to start trying to perfect something else. Feel free to make a list of.. ahem... suggested subjects, if you like."

"I'm sure I could - assign you some - practical projects aah!" He arched his back involuntarily, pushing up against her hand. "We could look at those - picture-books of yours I'm sure they're full of - interesting ideas for both of us. But right now I just want to lie back quietly - ah! - God! - _relatively_ quietly and just - feel. So that I can assess your marks properly, you understand."

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He was amazed to find that teaching Potter how to brew was much less onerous than he had expected. After a night in Hermione's welcoming arms and a morning of staffroom gossip with Minerva, the chance to teach something resembling Potions to a willing student was restful - cleansing, almost, in the way that it gave him the chance to clear his mind and concentrate only on the task at hand.

It was difficult not to be irritated by Potter, even now. His resemblance to his father was still stomach-churning, even after the fear and humiliation which James Potter had hammered into him had been overwritten by much greater horrors, and he had six years of Potter's open scorn and disrespect to unlearn, made so much worse by seeing that scorn still standing in Lily's eyes, as he had seen it on that fateful summer day, and forever after. Potter's sneering hatred had always recreated both of his parents as Severus had seen them in some of his worst moments, and still saw them in his dreams: his dire, public humiliation by James and the misery of his exile from Lily's affection. But now that the boy was making a Herculean effort to be polite, and very nearly succeeding, it was far easier to endure him.

Potter was never, perhaps, going to be a serious potioneer, yet the Half-Blood Prince's book seemed to have woken a spark in him - to have shown him how it was possible to find Potions fascinating, even if he himself did not. That, in turn, had caused him to approach the subject with a new willingness to learn, and the prospect of very-nearly-free alcohol concentrated his mind wonderfully. When the boy listened attentively to what he was told, and made a willing effort to follow instructions, Severus found it surprisingly easy to see him just as himself and not as a proxy for both of his parents - to respond to him as a normal student (however intrinsically annoying) and the friend of a friend, rather than as a living embodiment of the worst failure and grief of his life.

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"And, Hermione - one more thing," McGonagall said, freezing the younger woman in place with a steely eye. "What _exactly_ is going on between you and Severus?"

"Erm - what makes you think that there's anything, erm, 'going on'?"

"The fact that the pair of you both suddenly look mysteriously smug? The fact that when I asked him about it he turned an unbecoming shade of pink and told me to mind my own damned business?"

Hermione turned a fairly bright shade of pink herself. "I... er... well..." she stammered, feeling as if her Head of House had caught her kissing someone behind the broom-shed. Which was ridiculous, but still. "Uhm... well, it was sort of an accident..."

"He smiles to himself like the cat that got the cream when he thinks no-one is watching - it doesn't look very accidental to me. Are you certain you both know what you're doing? He is - I'm very pleased to see _anything_ make Severus smile, after what happened last year, but he is more than twice your age and still, technically, your teacher - even if in practice he is really your patient. I wouldn't like to think - for either of your sakes - that you had... got in over your head, out of kindness, or had had your head turned by the... dramatic aspects of the situation."

Hermione looked around to make sure nobody was listening, and resigned herself to telling the truth, and more or less the whole truth. "Well... I've been... I've had a crush on him for years," she admitted, her face getting even hotter. "Uhm... and looking after him, and spending all that time talking... about lots of things, classes and Arithmantic theory and which vegetables we like or don't... it got to be rather more than a crush. And he... found out." He could tell his own accidental-erection story if he wanted Minerva to know. "And... well... it took me quite a while to convince him that I wasn't just feeling sorry for him or... or trying to make fun of him. But I did convince him, and now we're sort of seeing how things go."

"And you're sure that your affections are likely to be... long-lasting? Severus is a proud, unbending man, especially now, when his sense of self has been so badly bruised. If he were to give his heart he would, I think, give it completely and for ever - but I know that when I was your age my attention-span for men was measured in months, and I would hate to see him get hurt."

Hermione smiled ruefully. "I'm a lot more confident about my affections being long-lasting than his, at the moment... after everything he's been through, a new emotional commitment can't be less than difficult at best. I wasn't even going to tell him, but... he seemed so stunned at the idea of being loved and... and yearned for. I convinced him to use Legilimency, to see himself as I saw him, and I think it helped. He knows I'm not lying to him out of pity, at least, or setting him up somehow. I love him very much," she finished in a small voice, feeling very embarrassed and yet incredibly relieved at being able to say it out loud.

"Nobody can guarantee the future, Miss Granger, and young people's personalities are usually still developing. You may find that the way you feel today is not the way you will feel when you are thirty. On the other hand, your personality has remained remarkably constant during the seven years that I have known you - and at the least, if Severus knows that you at least intended to give him your whole heart he won't feel that he's been - used again if it doesn't work out.

"And I do think, in fact, that this is quite a good time for him to form a new emotional commitment. It will give him something to think about besides how weak and disgusting he thinks he is. The mere fact that he now smiles when he thinks no-one is looking, instead of greeting, should tell us that."

"That's true. I think... it helps, knowing that _I_ don't see him that way, even if he does himself. And I didn't exactly intend to give him my whole heart, it happened entirely unintentionally," Hermione admitted. "He'd had a nightmare, and we were talking about Arithmantic theory to get him calmed down, and he had his head on my shoulder and we were talking about theoretical modelling and I just..." She gestured helplessly. "I just... knew. That he was all I wanted. And it was horrible, at first, because I was absolutely sure he'd never see me like that, and I couldn't make it go away." She laughed rather bitterly. "He was so... surprised isn't really the word. He couldn't _imagine_ the notion that someone might see him as something to aspire to, to yearn for... not only now, but that anyone could ever have seen him that way. And I have a rather long list of people I'd really like to kill for making him think of himself so... so meanly."

The older woman wiped away a surreptitious tear and sniffed in a delicate, ladylike way. "The list would probably have to begin with his father - who I'm afraid is already dead, although I suppose you could dig him up and throw stones at him. I wasn't really aware of it at the time, since he wasn't one of my own house-students, but Poppy Pomfrey tells me that he used to come back to Hogwarts after every home visit covered in bruises and - and welts. Whip-marks, you understand, from a belt. And I'm very much afraid the list might have to include Albus and myself, for we did him a great deal of damage, unwittingly, when we failed to take Sirius Black's attack on him very seriously. Albus was so very concerned about Sirius's mental state, following his final breach with his family, and Severus was such a very self-contained boy, and I'm afraid we just assumed that he - would cope. We - if anything it was a compliment of sorts, we relied on his good sense and thought we were safe to do so, but in fact it left him with the impression that we thought his life was of no account."

"I never did really like Sirius Black," Hermione said grimly. "Never. I tried to, for Harry's sake, but I just couldn't. I know he didn't consciously intend to put Harry in danger but 'Do as I say, not as I do' is never going to work on someone like Harry, he set a stupid, reckless example which undermined _years_ of work at keeping Harry from getting himself killed. And I don't imagine thinking that nobody cared enough to protect him helped Severus much, no. But he knows differently now... he knows that you care, and I've made bloody certain he knows that I do. He still keeps giving me funny looks, as if he thinks I'll come to my senses and run off or something, but I'm going to stay right there with him until he has to believe I'm not going to disappear." Then she blushed. She really shouldn't have said something that sounded quite so much like "so there" to the deputy headmistress.

McGonagall gave her a rather tight-lipped look, and then sighed. "I'm afraid poor Sirius truly was borderline psychotic, according to the definition of psychosis as a tendency to act without regard to the consequences of action. He was almost wholly driven by whim, and his whims were not infrequently malicious - especially where Severus was concerned. But that whole family were - well, you've seen how the portrait of his mother behaves, so it's perhaps not surprising that he himself ended up more than a little - disturbed.

"As for Severus - this whole _appalling_ business has at least given Albus and me the chance to try to show him that we actually care about him for himself, whether he is capable of work or not - to persuade him that neither of us sees him as just a, a useful tool to be discarded when broken. But he's a difficult man to convince."

"Oh, believe me, I've encountered that. I keep working at convincing him... I don't know if I have, yet, but I keep working at it. I want him to be able to see himself as I see him, as... well." She smiled sheepishly. "Someone rather wonderful. Even as battered as he currently is... which is all the harder for him to believe, but it doesn't make me admire him or care for him any the less."

"Rather more so, I would say, if anything. This has really brought home to me the fact that he _knew_ that something of this sort would be done to him if he were ever caught, and he swallowed what must have been almost overwhelming fear and went back anyway, month after month, year after year, to do what he thought was right."

Hermione nodded. "I was afraid of something... well, not like this, I just don't have this nasty an imagination... but I know some of the things Muggles do to captured spies and prisoners of war, I've seen pictures, and I was terrified every time I knew he'd gone away. I can't imagine how much courage it must have taken to keep going back... and he's actually surprised that I think he's wonderful, the great idiot."

"I'm afraid that one of the, the dark sides of magic is that it can be used to force someone to stay in their body and suffer long after death should have released them, so that it can enable horrors which Muggles can only dream of. This is not even to mention the damage which magic can do directly. Some of the curses which had been used against Severus... Bill Weasley said there were traces of things which made Cruciatus seem almost benign. They gave him potions to enhance sensation and prevent numbness..." Hermione closed her eyes, shuddering at that thought. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't burden you with this. But sometimes I think I'm going mad with grief. I know we did get him back - but at such a cost! And then he has the gall to lie there and tell me that he is worthless and I shouldn't bother with him."

"It's... I understand," Hermione said quietly, reaching out to put a tentative hand on her Head of House's arm. "Believe me, I feel the same way... it hurts so much, to see him in pain, and there's so little we can do. But being here for him helps. Knowing that he's loved, and wanted... and in my case, adored from afar even before we were friends... that does seem to help him believe that at least _we_ don't think he's worthless."

The older woman patted Hermione's hand, and sighed. "The trouble is, even if you convince him you care he just thinks you're deluded. Or possibly pretends to do so, just to be annoying. When I told him I couldn't care more about him if he were my own son, he called me a daft old biddy."

Hermione tried to suppress a giggle, and ended up coughing instead. "What did you say?"

"I threatened to make him write out 'I am intrinsically valuable, just by being myself' two hundred times." She smiled wryly. "At least it shut him up."

Hermione laughed. "And I bet it was comforting, in a strange way... I know I'd feel things were just a bit more normal if I were threatened with lines, no matter what happened." She took a deep breath, and mustered up a smile. "And for what it's worth... I have no intention of hurting him, or letting anything else hurt him, if it's at all preventable, and I want nothing more than to... well... be with him forever. So that, at least, you don't need to worry about."

"You cannot absolutely guarantee how you will feel once the - first flush of romantic infatuation wears off. And it will - it always does, except in persons suffering from pathological obsessions. However, the fact that the two of you have a great deal in common gives me hope that you may settle in very well together - although the fact that one of the things you have in common is being stubborn and argumentative may complicate matters somewhat."

"I know I can't guarantee I'll always feel this way, but at least you know... and more importantly, he knows... that I _intend_ to. That I'm sincere about it." Hermione smiled a bit wistfully. "It's... I feel horribly guilty about it, actually. Sometimes. I was drawn to him before - all this - and I'm fairly certain that I would have wound up in love with him regardless, but it feels as if I'm taking advantage, somehow. I was sure, before, that he'd never want me, and what if this is the only reason he does? What if he just... thinks he has to settle for me, because he can't do any better now?"

McGonagall gave a sharp snort of laughter. "You honestly think that a, a sour, dour, plain-featured, lonely man of almost forty - with, judging from the smirk he had plastered on his face this morning, an active sex-drive - is going to look at a, an attractive, adoring eighteen-year-old girl and think 'How disappointing, but I suppose this is the best I can hope for now'? My dear, forgive the indelicacy, but you are every heterosexual older man's wet-dream. He must wake up every morning and think it's his birthday.

"No: so long as your intentions towards him are as sincere as they appear to be I am no longer seriously worried about the situation from Severus's point of view, and I am reassured that you do know that this is what you want. I am however concerned that this - dalliance might interfere with your studies, so close to NEWTs."

Hermione pulled a wry face. "Oh, don't worry, Sev- Professor Snape is very strict about me getting all my essays done on time: nearly as strict as I am myself."

"I am relieved to hear it. And, yes, there are - issues, as you're probably aware, concerning... well, the nature of consent. He spent more time than I can bear thinking about last year being conditioned - being trained to obey any sexual demands which were made of him. There is always a risk that he might still feel that he has to - obey blindly anyone who desires him. But he certainly doesn't _look_ as if he feels he's being - degraded; quite the contrary, after spending the morning with you he looks more pleased with himself than I have ever seen him, not even after Slytherin thrashed Gryffindor on the Quidditch pitch for the sixth time in a row: which is doubly remarkable when you consider how - eaten up with self-disgust he has been since he was returned to us. If this had happened even three months ago then yes, I would have worried very much that you were taking advantage - but there comes a point at which I think we both have to assume that he is well enough and old enough to know his own mind."

Hermione blushed hard. "He could do better," she said firmly. "Someone who is his equal, someone he can talk to without having to slow down at all, not a... a student with an aggravating tendency to think she knows everything. But... thank you, anyway. I certainly want him to feel that way about it." She took a deep breath, feeling herself go even redder. "And I'm not... I wouldn't ask him to... I mean, I wouldn't say no if he did want to, I'd be quite happy actually, but I never want him to feel as if he... he HAS to, and I just admitted to having amorous designs on a teacher to another teacher and I'm going to stop talking now."

"You mean that you and he haven't actually...?" She gave a delicate, ladylike snort. "My dear, if he's this pleased with himself already, he's going to be insufferable when you actually cut to the chase."

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"By the way... I got collared by Professor McGonagall today. She warned me not to break your heart. If I'd had any intention of doing so, I'd have been quite frightened - she looked terribly fierce and protective."

"Good Lord - I thought your father was supposed to give _me_ the 'If you hurt my daughter' speech. Maybe we could just lock them in the bathroom together... But really it's - " He started blinking, overcome by sudden emotion but furiously determined not to show it. "I never had anybody to be - protective of me before" he finished, rather huskily. "I mean - not just of my physical survival, I know there are many people preserving my life even if I'm still not sure why they should want to - but of my, um, social well-being. Except you, of course."

"Don't be silly," she said, wrapping her arms around him and nuzzling her face into his neck. "Professor McGonagall's been acting like a tigress with a wounded cub ever since you came back to us, and Neville has actually shouted at people on your behalf, and I know you might never have known, but believe me I have lost count of the number of times Professor Dumbledore told Harry not to be rude about you, before you... And Mrs Weasley used to worry a lot that you didn't eat properly. She's a bit food-focused when it comes to looking after people. And I don't see it myself, but I'm assured by impartial witnesses that I turn into a raging harpy if I think somebody's upset you."

"That's - very gratifying" he said shakily. "Strange, but - gratifying. But it makes me realize what a - what a bloody bastard I am, to think that Longbottom would defend me, even - even jump in front of a hex for me after the way I treated him. Even Potter - the sight of him used to affect me like fingernails on a blackboard and he knows it but I owe my life to him, don't I? Ultimately. And in what way do I deserve this - kindness?"

"By being yourself. And if it makes you feel better, you drove Harry every bit as mad as he drove you. The two of you used to be like asphodel and knarl quills - put you even close to the same cauldron and explosions were sure to follow."

"They may yet," he muttered, patting Hermione's shoulder absently as she snuggled closer to him. "It's early days, and I'm still not sure this - civility will last."

"You're both trying, at least, and Harry - well, he's been very protective of you ever since he realised he'd been so wrong about you, even when you were driving him mad." She arched slightly under his touch like a cat. "As for the rest of us... we love you. And Neville, bless his forgiving heart, would be positively aghast to realize you're worried about how you treated him before. All is forgiven, and he'd be miserable to think he was upsetting you in any way, even in retrospect."

"Then I will have to try to be simply - happy in all this new-found affection, as undeserved as I feel it to be. It would be ungrateful of me to be anything otherwise."

"I don't... I didn't choose to love you so you'd be _grateful_," Hermione muttered. She looked down at her hands. "Professor McGonagall, she - well, she wanted to know what my long term intentions towards you were. She, she said that what I felt now might not be what I felt when I was thirty and I know that that's true but I told her, I do intend to go on feeling - like this, and I'm pretty sure of my own long-term feelings even if..."

She tailed off, blushing, and Snape leaned his head back against the back of the couch and sighed. "Even if you aren't sure of mine." She nodded tightly, and he pulled a wry face. "In the story Lovegood was telling me when I was - I could say when I was 'not myself', but part of me thinks that that, that mindless thing was more myself than I am now, but at any rate when I was - not functioning, there was a verse which went _'Others may offer more than they can give, / All that they have for as long as they live, / I will love you as long as I can, / However long that may be,' said he_. We can't - we can't ever be sure of our future selves, really; but I find that I do hope that 'as long as I can' can be... well, permanent. If that helps."

"It does. A lot." She reached out to touch his cheek lightly. "I want it to be forever, but I know I can't promise it will be. But I'm certainly going to try to make sure it is... and I do think I will always love you. Even if it's not always in the same way, I don't think I could ever stop caring about you after everything we've been through, even if... this... does end someday."

Severus rubbed his face against her fingers like a cat. "That's - well, it makes things easier. The main limitation on my - commitment is my concern that if this, this _relationship_ should some day fail, one or both of us will be left worse off than if we had not begun it. But if we can say, with some confidence, that even if the, ah, sexual aspect should prove to be transient, we will both be able to look back on it as something positive, not as something bitter..." He turned his head and kissed the base of her thumb, fleetingly. "Why then in that case, I think, I see no reason why we should not consider our... probationary period a success, and proceed to whatever the appropriate equivalent of tenure is."

"A tenured relationship." She grinned suddenly. "I like that. It sounds so dignified, and it conjures up lovely images of the two of us all old and grey and sniping at each other over the translation of some esoteric volume on alchemy." She brushed the pad of her thumb lightly over his lips. "And I think, even if this did end, I'd still be glad it happened. And I hope we'd still be friends."

Severus nipped gently at her thumb, his lips quirking, then gave her a rather pained smile. "Friendship is another thing at which I have little experience, I'm afraid. The life of a spy does not encourage emotional baggage. But I do like the idea of a sort of... lifelong academic collaboration, with or without added sex. Although 'with' definitely has a certain charm."

"It does. And you're just going to have to get used to having friends now... everyone who's been looking after you, for a start." She took his hand, pressing a solemn kiss to his thumb in turn before snuggling her cheek into his palm. "And of course we'll have to discuss exactly what having a tenured relationship conveys in regards to access to each other's private libraries - I've been dying to rummage through yours, and I know I have some new books you haven't seen yet."

"Your private books, however, will only expand the mind - not fry, pickle or parboil it. You've already seen most of the safer stuff..." He looked at her bright-eyed, eager-puppy expression and pursed his lips. "I suppose looking at some of the more dangerous volumes could be considered as part of your tuition in Defence Against the Dark Arts; but if I let you read some of them you _will_ do so only in my presence and under my strict supervision, do I make myself clear?"

"For now, yes." She nodded, then smiled at him. "But you see, the nice thing about a tenured relationship is that we have lots of time for me to be good enough to read the dangerous ones without you... and for me to find some that you're not allowed to read without me."

"Trust me, there are some of them even I'm worried about opening on my own. I always used to leave a note for Albus explaining which book I was about to tackle, just in case he - well, had to come and retrieve me from the twelfth dimension, or decontaminate my radioactive corpse, or... I'm sure you get the picture."

"I do. And you're not to read any of them without me to here to look after you," she said sternly, leaning down to kiss him. "Not anymore. I have no intention of letting you wander off to the twelfth dimension now that we've achieved tenure. At least, not without me." She kissed him again, for emphasis. "I would be very upset if you vanished on me when my back was turned."

"I'm less inclined to take wild risks now that - well, now that I know I have your nerves to consider. And before - when I was spying, you'd think it would make me cautious but in some ways it made me the reverse, I was in so _much_ danger, all the time, that it made me reckless. I couldn't see any likelihood of surviving anyway, so what did it matter, if I could strike a blow against V - it's no good, I can't say it - against _Him_."

Hermione nodded, taking his hand and kissing the thin fingers gently. "I intend to give you lots and lots to make surviving a worthwhile effort," she said firmly. "Especially now that we have tenure and plans for research when we're old and grey."

"Which will be next Tuesday, the way things are going." He gave her hand a gentle squeeze. "I shall have to get a ring for you to kiss, like a bishop. Think how it will annoy Potter!"

She laughed. "Oh, it really would... but I wouldn't bother with the ring, really. I like touching you, even just your fingers. Just... being with you. It's nice."

"It is. Nice, I mean. But being touched all the time is..." He shut his eyes for a moment, not wanting to offend her when she had been so kind to him, and yet not wanting to store up trouble and resentment for later by putting it off. If he didn't say it now, somewhere further down the line she would be angry, she would be wanting to know why he hadn't told her before, and what could he say but _I was a coward_.

"Sitting next to you, leaning against you, putting my arm round you - you putting your arm round me! - that's very pleasant. Touching each other when we are both, ah, sexually interested is more than pleasant. But being, sort-of, fiddled with... I was never a, a _touchy-feely_ type at the best of times, and when I was - when I was _there_ they were touching me all the time, they wouldn't stop touching me, grabbing, pawing, their hands on me..." He stopped for a moment to draw a deep, steadying breath. "If you touch me too much in that restless fidgety way, kissing my fingers and so on, without a, a warm-up first it just makes me want to panic."

He ducked his head aside, still not looking at her, and flinched as if he expected her to hit him. "I'm sorry." He felt the flinch, and cursed himself for it; but he was shamefully aware that he associated apologizing with pleading and quailing in front of his father, who would have hit him.

"Oh..." Hermione let go hastily, her face going red. "I'm sorry, I never thought of that. I just... I didn't think, I'm sorry." She bit her lip, trying to pull her face straight - it was bad enough that she'd upset him, without upsetting him more by showing that _she_ was upset. "I'll be more careful. Thank you for telling me."

"Not your fault." He gave her an oblique, uncertain smile. "You have to treat me like a stray cat - I'm sure many people would say that was appropriate! You have to lead up to things in a, a calm way or I'm liable to hiss and swipe at you, although I can fairly guarantee not to whazz in your shoe."

"I will." She hitched up her knees and wrapped her arms around them, to keep her hands from wandering over to him again. "I'm not usually a touchy-feely sort either, really, but with you..." She shrugged, looking down at her knees. "I still feel as if you might disappear if I don't hold onto you, I suppose. Especially when we're talking about you vanishing when my back is turned."

"I like to be held - by you, certainly - and that... well, it doesn't feel like anything _they_ did. But being - pawed at, crowded when I wasn't prepared for it, it makes me want to back away fast, and I don't want to want to back away from you. Especially not now that we've achieved tenure." He pulled a face at her. "I'm like a mule, I know it, and I don't just mean the teeth - I go much farther much faster if I'm led than if I'm pushed. And I want to be able to go, um, _farther_, I really do. Only I'm not..."

He made a restless, uneasy gesture, wrapping his arm across his chest and rubbing at his collarbone, one degree of neurosis away from clawing at his own skin again. "Half of me is still poised on the edge of panic, all the bloody time, and I still more than half feel that I am - well, contaminated. That wanting to go, ah, further just proves how dirty I am. Which I know is irrational, so you don't have to say it - if enthusiasm for sex was proof of corruption, you'd be at least as tainted as I am, and I don't see you that way at all."

She moved around until she could rest her shoulder against his, keeping her hands clasped and resisting the urge to reach for him. "I'm sorry," she said softly. "Really. I'll be careful not to... to paw anymore. I never, ever want to make you feel like that." She smiled ruefully. "It's not just a matter of wanting to go further. I do, but there's no real rush for it. I just like... being with you. Talking to you, touching you, looking at you... I'll be more careful about it, though, I promise."

Severus sighed and leaned heavily against her. "I don't want to make you feel anxious about touching me," he said in some frustration. "It's just - you know how if you get too... insistent when you're handling Crookshanks, he wraps his paws round your arm and kicks? I know because I did, and he did. I've never seen you clawed from wrist to elbow so I presume you manage to handle the little brute without getting lacerated." He rubbed his cheek against her shoulder, consciously imitating her cat. "Brush my hair? That's always very pleasant." Which was true, and it would give her the chance to touch him in a manner which was calm and steady and not at all disturbing, except in pleasurable ways.

"It really is." She summoned the brush and proceeded to do exactly that. "I just... well. We're both beginners at this whole relationship thing, right? If you tell me when I make mistakes and I tell you if you do, and we both take it in the spirit in which it's meant and don't get huffy, then we'll get it all sorted out soon enough." She smiled suddenly, smoothing his hair with her free hand. "And if we can manage that, we'll actually be doing a lot better than most couples, so there you are."

"We would, at that." As the brush slid smoothly through his hair in long easy strokes, he wriggled into a more comfortable position and lay back against her contentedly.

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And when it all went wrong, as it was bound to, sometimes - on days when the mere fact that somebody cared for or about him seemed like an insupportable, cloying burden - on mornings when the singing rush of climax collapsed into darkness, and his heart raced and leapt at the memory of his own helpless revulsion as he was crushed and clutched at and impaled by another man's sweating weight, or nights when the taste of himself on her lips made him shove her away and curl up, crying - then her gentle touch and her open, unpatronizing concern was as soothing as cool water, and her willingness to adapt, to adjust, to temper what she wanted to what he needed both emotionally and sexually made him feel as if it might be possible to feel, some day, that his body was really his own again, and not just someone else's toy.

Or at least, if he was a toy, he was now the toy of a very careful owner, and that was a vast improvement. He knew himself to be as idiotically eager and grateful as a spaniel as the fits of darkness became fewer, as his still-raw nerves learned how to expect pleasure instead of pain and his body's reflexes gradually relaxed and began to trust that it was, literally, in safe hands.

* * *

**Author's note:**

Severus is being very slightly unfair to James and Sirius in his description of how their enmity started. In _The Prince's Tale_ we see that Severus expressed the hope that Lily would be in Slytherin; James made a disparaging but non-specific remark about Slytherin (but not directly about Severus); Sirius made a half-hearted defence of Slytherin; James then made a rather melodramatic declaration to Sirius about how much he wanted to be in Gryffindor; Severus made a very disparaging remark about Gryffindors being thick, strongly implying that James was setting his sights too low; Sirius upped the stakes by making a direct personal attack on Severus; Lily made it clear she wasn't impressed by James and Sirius and they then descended to jeering at Lily, name-calling at Severus and trying to trip him up.

Although James started it by being spiteful and smug about Slytherin, and without any provocation, this was followed by a cycle of escalation to which Severus did contribute, before James and Sirius progressed to actively sneering at him personally. But Severus was knee-jerk sensitive and defensive at the time without really being aware of himself doing it, and the years of subsequent persecution have coloured his memory, so that he only remembers it as "I said I wanted to be in Slytherin and they attacked me for it."

At British schools, social status tends to depend on whether or not one is "good at games", or it certainly did when Severus was a boy. This is so well-known that there was a 1983 film called _Good and Bad at Games_, based on a story by William Boyd about a man who sets out to take revenge on the bullies who made his schooldays a misery.

To be something _manqué_ is to attempt to be it, in an amateurish way, and not quite succeed.

I know the proper spelling is "aerated", not "aereated", but in its incarnation as a British slang expression for becoming over-excited it's pronounced with an extra syllable - air-ree-ated.

Some social/medical authorities in Victorian England did not believe that normal women felt any sexual desire (which would have been news to Queen Victoria, who was very highly-sexed). Sex was seen by them as something which men enjoyed and women endured, and Englishwomen were advised to "lie back and think of England" - that is, to put up with sex as part of the necessary duty of maintaining the population.

As a cultural note, I'm nearly fifty, and I have friends and acquaintances from all over Britain. Other than Orthodox Jews, within my own circle I am only aware of one couple who waited to have sex until they were married: that was a quarter of a century ago and even then their decision was thought of as eccentric and quaint. Even in the 1950s, surveys show that one third of British brides went to the altar pregnant.

"Greeting" in this context is a Scots word for crying.

To "cut to the chase" is to get on with the main purpose of something and stop messing about with inessentials.

"Whazz" is a Derbyshire dialect word for urination.

* * *

**N.B.**If the person called Cassandra who flamed _Still Recruiting_ to complain about my inclusion of detailed author's notes and asked me to reply is reading this: a) a lot of people write to say that they like the author's notes and find them useful, which is why I do them, and you must remember that many people reading these stories are not fluent English-speakers and need all the help they can get; and b) the e-mail address you supplied is a dud, and gives back only error messages.

Also note, my (**whitehound**'s) enormous essay on Snape's personality, with special reference to the evidence for his being especially nasty (or not), has been updated to take DH canon into account. You can find it on the fannish section of my website at **www dot whitehound dot co dot uk slash Fanfic**, under the title _But Snape is just nasty, right?_

Also on there you will find an essay called _Fanfiction. net How-To_. This is a guide to using ffn's story-upload and editing features. It includes lists of what characters will and will not display properly in story, message and review text (bearing in mind that this changes every time ffn does a site update, so the page is regularly updated), and examples of dozens of interesting section breaks which will display correctly in ffn story-text, and which you can copy-and-paste into your own stories.


	24. 21 Games of Skill and Chance

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

I pushed this through in a hurry because it was on the Potter_Place group's Christmas wish-list, so I haven't had time to proof-read it thoroughly. Plus I typed the last bit of it whilst listening to the Christmas Eve _Midsummer Murders_ at the same time. If you spot any typoes, please let me know. N.B. Harry saying "thatum" is _not_ a typoe, just gabble.

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**21: GAMES OF SKILL AND CHANCE**

At least the Easter break meant that there were few students around, and he could sit out in the grounds with a few friends (!) and collect a little fresh air. Since fifth year he had always preferred to remain indoors, where he would not be reminded of the sun-dappled afternoons with Lily which he had thrown away in a moment of anguished rage, and where there were more crannies in which to hide from (or occasionally ambush) his persecutors - although he realized now that the reason he had rarely been able to sneak up on, or away from, the snidey little bastards was because they were able to spot him on their magical map.

The sun, in any case, tended to make him queasy. But the spring weather was fresh rather than oppressive, and six months stuck in his own sitting-room had rather given him a sickener for "indoors": so much so that he made his mind up that even after the students returned tomorrow, he would still take the chance to sit outside and read, at least while they were in class. He realized with a slight jolt that the actual six-month anniversary of his return from hell had passed unnoticed almost a week ago, amicably spent in sexual experimentation with Hermione, and teaching Potter to bottle something more tangible than glory.

Sitting with his back against the fateful beech tree, going over a NEWT-year revision timetable with Horace while Longbottom lounged on his stomach in the grass nearby, doing a little light revision of his own, and his Slytherin bodyguard lurked in the bushes in what they imagined was a stealthy fashion, Severus realised that despite the feelings of unworthiness and bone-deep dirtiness which continued to ambush him at odd moments and spill out in sudden surges of self-loathing, his state of mind had been through a sea-change. The memory of terror still hovered at the back of every breath, but it felt like a nuisance rather than a fundamental condition of existence. He was still traumatized, still struggling to regain himself, and he supposed he always would be: but trauma and recovery were now things he was fitting in in the spare moments of something approaching a real life, rather than being his primary focus.

He was even thinking of allowing the stone snakes around the fireplace to slither back into his life....

Even so, it was a relief to be able to talk to Minerva and not conceal his relationship with Hermione: to be able to tell someone less biased than Hermione herself about his dread of proving unworthy of her, and be given peremptory reassurance. To be able to rant and rave at her, when ranting and raving felt like the only alternative to suffocation, and not have to all the time watch his words in case he gave away what should have remained unsaid as he still must do, for the moment, with Albus - and wasn't _that_ a conversation to look forwards to....

He extracted his faintly slimy quill from underneath Trevor, who was attempting to snuggle, and frowned. Why he should feel guilty about being less than transparently honest with Albus, who was himself as transparent as fourteen feet of lead plate, he wasn't sure; but the knowledge that to some extent it served the old goat right didn't make him any less uncomfortable about accepting Albus's comfort and companionship under what were to some extent false pretences - and he could hardly reject them without explanation. But at least he could now discuss his dilemma with Minerva, and be robustly reassured that what Albus didn't know, wouldn't hurt him (but then, like most Gryffindors, Minerva had always felt that rules only happened to other people).

And there was, perhaps, no point in telling Albus anyway. NEWTs were less than two months away, and the time was soon approaching when the inexorable turn of the school year would carry Hermione, and Longbottom, Draco and even Potter away from him, and he did not know how he would cope with their loss and hardly dared even to think of it, although he had confidence enough, now, to suppose that, like Adrian, they would make some effort to keep in touch. At least for a while.

If his "thing" with Hermione was doomed to die away once she had left Hogwarts, there seemed no point in complicating her reputation, and his own, by telling Albus about it. But he dared to hope that Hermione was the true gold and could be relied on, all the way, and Minerva seemed confident that she had meant what she had said about tenure: and in that case he was sooner or later going to have to admit to the Headmaster that he was carrying on with a student. Even if she wasn't, technically, _his_ student.

Unless, that is, he put it off until after Hermione had left school, and then persuaded Albus that the relationship had only just begun; but that would mean telling an intentional lie, and that was a thing he had always hated to do - even though the life of a spy made it an absolute necessity at times.

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It was a relief to Hermione, too, to be able to discuss the situation openly with Professor McGonagall. There were times when the stress of dealing with Severus's mental and physical injuries and her own uncertainty made her want to explode, and talking to Severus himself about it felt more than a little peculiar, not to mention recursive. But at least if she told the older woman she didn't know how to deal with _X_, and McGonagall admitted that she didn't either, it mobilised Hermione's bustling competitiveness and encouraged her to find a solution just to prove that she could, instead of feeling overwhelmed.

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"I've been thinking," Harry said, laying the Ace of Clubs down firmly on Severus's Three of Diamonds.

"And what a novel experience that must be for you."

"I love you too. Hearts, by the way."

"Diamonds," Severus said firmly, playing the Ace of Hearts. "Last card. What have you been thinking, Potter?"

"Oh, I was wondering if - miss a go," he added vaguely, laying down the Seven of Diamonds, followed by the Seven and Eight of Spades and the Eight and Ten of Hearts. "Miss a go, miss a go, miss a go, last card and - out. Wondering if you'd consider, um, teachingmeOcclumencyagain."

After a brief pause while he wrung some sense out of Potter's gabble, Severus cocked an eyebrow. "And what, may I ask, has caused this sudden access of common sense?""

"Hermione said thatum, that it was stupid to worry about security leaks when the biggest one was right in my own head and Ron agreed with her, which he nearly never does, and, um, that now that you and I were 'making such good progress' - her words -"

"I was watching her when we agreed to play cards," Severus said sourly. "I half expected her to pat us on the head."

"You mean her 'good boy!' expression? That she gives you when you've done something clever against all her expectations?"

"I take it you've seen that one before."

"On a regular basis since first year."

"And you don't object to being treated like a badly behaved puppy who's finally learned a trick?"

"Usually I deserve it."

"True."

"So do you."

"... shut up and deal."

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"Rolanda said you were really coming along well, Severus," Poppy murmured, working her thumbs in around his sharp shoulder-blades in a smooth, circular motion.

"Ungh." As the massage progressed to his collar bones he let his head fall forwards, feeling the tension in his neck slackening off. He was severely out of practice at brewing large quantities of anything, especially the fine-chopping-of-enormous-quantities-of-herbs aspect of the process, and replenishing the hospital wing's supply of Sneeze-Ease in preparation for the hay-fever season had left his shoulders feeling (horribly like they had felt when he was hung up by the hands and left to dangle and be whipped but he wasn't going to think about that, and here he had Poppy's firm, kind hands to take away the pain and make it almost worth it).

"Yes," Poppy continued brightly; "she said you were already walking better than Sylvanus ever did with _his_ replacements, even after all the time he had to practise."

"I should certainly hope so," he muttered. "I'd rather lounge in a litter and be carried like the cripple I am, than lurch about like a cheap wind-up toy robot."

"I'm sure you're already moving like quite an expensive row-boat," the matron said soothingly, and gave his shoulder a firm pat. "There - how's that?"

He rotated his neck cautiously. "Better," he conceded.

"In fact," Poppy said, a note of caution creeping into her voice, "Adrian and I were wondering - well, you've recovered so very well, Severus, really you have, all things considered and we were wondering if - that is, if you'd mind if we wrote a paper about your treatment, to be submitted to the _Journal of Contemporary Medical Magic_."

Severus could feel his mental gears lurch slightly. Part of him wanted to cry "No!" and push away the thought of strangers reading the details of his degradation - and it was hard to see how such a paper could usefully be written without going into at least some of the sordid details, nor in a way which would preserve his anonymity, since the basic fact of his destruction and resurrection must be known to the whole of wizarding Britain by now. Part of him still felt that he had no right to privacy or to resent what anyone might make of him; and in any case every miserable, intimate horror was already known to the slimy bastards who had inflicted it, which made the very concept of privacy feel meaningless.

But the third part knew that the treatments which had saved him might be used to save others, if they were known and researched, and something in his heart which had long been rusty began to stir and move, scenting the winds of knowledge and intellectual power. "I don't - know," he said slowly. "I'll have to think about it. But I'm sure of one thing: if I say 'Yes', I'm going to co-write it."

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"I almost forgot, but while Longbottom was here yesterday... well, after what you were saying the other week, about whether or not you were of sufficient help to me, I decided to - make you something." He fished in the drawer of the bedside table, took out a roll of clean, crisp parchment and handed it to her, with a sideways look which was both teasing and bashful. Feeling suddenly nervous with anticipation, Hermione undid the green silk ribbon which kept the sheet rolled, and looked at the familiar small, spiky writing, which was less scrawling and untidy than usual. He had evidently made a great effort to be neat.

"If I had thought that I had ceased to care  
that beauty came not knocking at my door;  
if I had thought it was a certain law  
that I, a plain man, would not win the fair;  
if, as I say, I thought my heart was dead,  
desire's spark in me had long grown cold,  
my leaden soul would never turn to gold  
and no balm eased the ache of tears unshed;  
then she, whose shining far outstrips the sun,  
who showed to me that beauty could be mine  
and mined the gold in me, and cleansed my shame,  
has shown me that the race is worth the run.  
The Nut-Brown Maid is fierce and fair as wine,  
and at her heat I kindle my own flame."

"Oh..." Hermione whispered, her eyes filling with tears. "Severus, that's... it's beautiful, I...." Talking was entirely insufficient. She kissed him, clutching the scroll tightly to her. "Thank you," she whispered between kisses. "I love you so very much...."

He leaned into her kisses and returned them with interest, drawing her close and then pulling her down onto the bed and rolling over with her until he lay half across her, recklessly happy. When he had kissed her breathless he put his fingers across her lips to indicate that she should keep quiet for a moment, and then propped himself up as best he could with the other arm, the wooden one, as alien and stiff as that still felt, and lay there gazing down at her. Her lips tickled as she kissed the palm of his hand.

"I suppose," he said seriously, "that I must love you, or I wouldn't have written it. Love - love is a difficult concept to define, especially for someone who has been so - cut off from all warmth for as long as I have been. But you are - shining to me, and I hate all those who would harm you, and I count every moment that I am not with you as wasted - so I suppose I must be as mad for you as one of your silly schoolmates, even though - even though my own emotions are all still somewhat at a remove from me. That's - something of an occupational hazard, for an Occlumens. But you've taught me what joy means, which - which I never knew before, even before I was.... And I don't just mean sexual joy - en_joy_able though that is - but feeling...."

He moved his fingers out of the way and kissed her again, softly. "All my life, the future looked at best like a hard, lonely struggle, scrambling to get out of a dark place before it swallowed me whole, and ever since - since He returned I could see nothing ahead but the jaws of a long death - and nothing past that but endless flat nothingness, even if I somehow survived. But now - _now_ when on one level I feel that I am - ruined, broken, degraded, thanks to you and at the same time I feel that the future is full of possibility; that my own ruin and degradation is something I don't have to face alone and that facing it in company might be weirdly enjoyable; that warmth and comfort and companionship are actually possible, even for such as me, and that life might actually become something to be savoured rather than merely endured."

She kissed him, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. "I... feel very small and humble, hearing that," she said softly. "I want so badly to be everything you describe, and I'm very afraid of somehow failing you. I know you think it's a sign of insanity on my part, but I still don't feel entirely worthy of you." She smiled a rather wobbly smile. "And yet I don't recall ever being quite as happy as I am right at this moment. I love you, and you love me, and everything else seems utterly unimportant and irrelevant right at this second." She cupped his face between her hands, lifting her head to kiss the tip of his nose gently. "I had no idea you could be so... romantic. I like it very much."

He returned the favour, kissing her eyelids in turn. "I've always been a closet romantic" he said lightly - "and I don't mean I like to make love in cupboards, although I wouldn't definitely rule it out. Haven't you heard me waxing lyrical about some stinking, phlegm-coloured potion or other? How much easier to be lyrical about such a... _delicious_ subject." Teasing, he flicked his tongue across her lips until she arched off the bed trying to kiss him back, and then began to kiss and lick in a long trail leading all the way down the curves of her chest and her belly - still not fully used to using the prosthetic fingers and fumbling awkwardly at the buttons on her blouse and skirt, until she assisted him with unsteady hands. As he held her knees firmly apart she thought, insofar as she still had enough attention left for thinking, that it was a very clever trick of his - to make her sing with _his_ tongue....

Afterwards, when they were both pleasurably tired and sated, he held her close against his chest with her head tucked in under his chin, and lay there staring at the green waters lapping at the window-pane. "You mustn't think," he said quietly, "that you will be able to get it right every time - nor must you expect to. I am very badly - damaged, in my body, in my mind and in my spirit and I know this. There will be times when you fail me, and you mustn't expect it to be otherwise. Annoying as it must be for you even to contemplate, there are some arts where perfection is simply not achievable. But you've already helped me a very great deal, and I have confidence that you will go on doing so, and I'm not a, a dangerous potion which will explode if you add one extra kneazle-hair - I'm not going to go all purple and die if you fumble the occasional catch, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor, and I promise you now that I won't kill myself. You promise me you won't lacerate yourself with guilt if you don't always get it absolutely right every single time. Otherwise I'm just going to worry myself into a crisis over it - and you wouldn't want that, would you?"

"I know there'll be times when I can't help," Hermione admitted, her fingers tracing idle patterns on his chest. "I hate the idea, you're right, but I'll live with it. I suspect it would have been that way even if... all this... hadn't happened, and I'd somehow managed to convince you to get involved with me anyway. Some of those wounds are very old, and very deep." She paused, smiling a little. "Mmm. What would you have done if you hadn't lost your cover, if this had been just another year, and I'd lost my head and let you know how drawn to you I was? I suspect it would involve decaying Flobberworms, my toothbrush, and a horrified injunction never to say such a thing again...."

"I would have assumed you were mocking me," he said promptly, "and taken twenty points off Gryffindor for cheek. And for cruelty," he added quietly. "If you had actually managed to convince me you were sincere, I would have been deeply flattered - and deeply horrified. You were my student, for God's sake. It still - 'freaks me out,' as Longbottom would put it, to think that you were my student, and so recently, but at least now that I am... on extended medical leave, as Albus delicately puts it, at least now I'm not in authority over you. And, as you yourself pointed out, you are to some extent in authority over me, since without the prostheses I need your help even to go to the bloody lavatory.

"I would have been - oh, God, on the one hand I wouldn't have wanted to turn down the only person who'd actually wanted me for bloody _years_ that wasn't a fucking Death Eater, and I would have been - so amazed, and I wouldn't have wanted to hurt you just for caring about me - and then I would have wanted to hurt you, for being bloody stupid enough to care about me, and for - disturbing my world-view. And the idea, the idea that I even might take advantage of my power over someone so much younger, that someone would even think that I might, and knowing that, that part of me wanted to take you up on it.... God, how I would have hated myself."

"I would never have told you on purpose, while we were teacher and student, not really" she said thoughtfully, kissing the side of his neck. "I mean, getting someone fired... or possibly lynched... is hardly an effective way of demonstrating your affection. But you might have found out anyway. If you had... well, I probably wouldn't have had any idea what to do. I would have dropped Potions, at least... I like the subject a lot, but it would have been bloody awkward at best for both of us, and you not teaching me directly might have helped. And in the long run it probably would have been best for both of us if you didn't know... on the other hand, given that neither of us has any guarantee or even much likelihood of _having_ a long run, at this point, I would have hated for one of us to die without you knowing that you'd been loved."

"Oh, God, Hermione, I don't even want to think about a scenario in which you die and I don't. But... thank you. For the thought. If I - if I hadn't made it, last year, I would indeed have died thinking that I had never in my life inspired more than the sort of vague affection one feels for any long-term colleague except - well, except for Lily, and her love, if it was love, ended up as - not even hatred, I could have born hatred, but just - contempt." His mouth tightened in a flinch at the knowledge of how that had undermined him, for all the years until Hermione had come to give him back to himself. She frowned at him, but even he could see and trust that she did so out of anxiety for him rather than scorn, and he felt himself uncoiling in the warmth of her gentle concern.

"But now.... Even though - even though I still can't really believe that I deserve your love, or you, if fate has given me such an unearned gift then I am deeply, wondrously grateful for it. And if you had told me that you loved me after you left school, or at least after the final end of classes when I no longer had any authority over you, then I would have done... _this_!" he said, tilting her head back with his thumb under her chin, and bending to kiss her firmly on the lips.

Hermione kissed him back, snuggling against him happily. "And I hate the thought of ever losing you, too," she said softly. "But if it ever did happen, it would be so much worse if I'd never told you, if you'd thought you were alone and... and unwanted." She rubbed the tip of her nose very gently against his. "And you deserve far more love than any single person could give... and you have it, even if you have trouble believing it."

"I don't believe it - I _can't_ believe it" he said half-seriously, rubbing his cheek against hers like a cat. "But maybe if you - and Minerva and all the rest of them - keep on telling me for a decade or two it will start to sink in. And in the meantime I am always open to - practical demonstration."

"You know, I've noticed that about you myself. And I, personally, am quite enthusiastic about the idea of demonstrating to you just how much I love you, as often as possible." She smiled, snuggling against him. "You are a daft lump of a man, as Professor McGonagall would put it, not to know how very loveable you are. I may have to draw you a diagram."

"Complete with numbered parts, you insatiable chit." He lay for a while and just looked at her, trying to recapture the reckless joy which he had felt earlier, but instead finding himself suddenly ineffably sad, knowing that whatever happened, all this constant companionship must suffer a sea-change at the end of the school year and what replaced it would be different, even if not necessarily worse.

"I answered your question," he said quietly, "so here's a question for you. You know why they.... It amused them not to feed me, then they could torment me without effort, just by making me watch them eat. They gave me just enough water to keep me alive, always fouled in some way, and they used spells and potions to sustain me and other than that, nothing at all to eat or to drink for four bloody months, unless you count - Only they miscalculated. They thought that they could keep me going like that almost indefinitely, but they found that they could not, and by that time my stomach was so shrunken that feeding me more than a mouthful would have killed me anyway. That was why they decided to cut their losses, cut _me_ and dump me back at Hogwarts when they did."

He looked her in the eyes, serious and sad. "If they had not - miscalculated, and if they had done as they had originally intended and posted me back to Albus as a Christmas gift, nothing but a, a torso and a skull, pruned of everything that could be pruned without killing me, eyeless, tongueless, lipless, gelded, unable to communicate in any way except by Legilimency, and even that only with someone powerful enough to overcome the lack of eye contact, and yet still - agonizingly aware, what would you have done then? Could you still have loved what was left?"

She considered the question... it was a serious one, and a sentimental or casual answer wouldn't do. "I could," she said, after a long pause. "It would have been dreadfully painful, but if you'd ever let me communicate with you, _via_ Legilimency, and assuming that I could... I don't think I could have hidden from you how much I cared. It's your mind I've always been most drawn to, your wit and brilliance and hidden passion...." She smiled sadly. "I would have given you whatever comfort I could, tried to make it bearable for you... and let you go, if that was what you wanted." Her eyes filling with sudden tears, she rested her forehead against his. "I don't ever want to lose you, Severus... this was too close, I couldn't bear getting you back and then losing you again...."

"I don't want to lose you either, and I don't - oh, God, I don't want to think about the possibility of falling into their hands again. But the Slytherins - they do watch over me, and I am probably in less immediate danger now than I have ever been in my life. If - He - wins, which God forbid, we'd both be in appalling danger, and in that case I would certainly rather die than be re-taken. But...."

He moved to tuck her down comfortably under his chin again, so that he could hold her properly. "If I had ended up... like that," he said slowly, "I would have been begging for death. I mean, even after I knew I was free. But if you had shown me your mind, your love, your comfort, and assuming I was able to recognize them for what they were, then I would have wanted to stay, at least for a while - just to have more of that warmth and kindness, to ease the pain of what had been done to me. You know that - needing to be held embarrasses me, for showing such weakness, but what embarrasses me most of all is finding out how much I like it. I don't remember anyone ever holding me in that, that _kind_ way ever before, and even if I had been stripped down to - what does the song say? - 'an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg' - still I would have recognized your kindness and wanted more of it."

"And I would have held you day and night, I would never have let you go unless I had to," Hermione said softly, nuzzling her face into his neck. "And I would have searched night and day for a way to make you well again... which scares me a bit, actually. If I were faced with losing you, I don't think there's much I wouldn't have been willing to do. And there are usually ways to get what you want, if you don't care what the price is going to be." It was the essence of Dark Magic, really... anything for a price. "I wouldn't care what happened to me, not if the alternative was living without you...."

"I'd care, though." He laughed, briefly and rather thickly, feeling choked with emotion. "And that would have necessitated another loan of Albus's time-turner, wouldn't it, if you were going to cradle me day and night _and_ search night and day for a cure - unless you were planning to set up a day-bed in the library! And even so you would have had to let Minerva have a turn sometimes, you know - your muscles would have wasted if you didn't at least walk about a bit, and besides, she'd moan at you for monopolizing me." He sighed into her hair and rubbed his rather sharp chin against the top of her head. "Thank God it didn't come to that. Even if - even if you would have found a way to help me, in the end. A prosthetic hand I can just about live with, but I'd feel really... well, the idea of ending up with two independently rotating artificial eyeballs and a prosthetic widge is truly disturbing."

"A _what_??"

"You know - um, down there. It's what they call it where I come from."

Hermione grinned, wiping her eyes hastily as she propped herself up to smile down at him. "That is... actually rather adorable. I'm going to call it that now. And I could study _while_ holding you, if I had a book-stand." She kissed him lingeringly. "I love you," she said softly. "I don't ever want to have to live without you. So you are to be very, very careful with yourself from now on, do you hear me?" She kissed him again, letting the kisses wander over his face. "Or I will be very upset with you. And I'll probably cry on you until you're soggier than Trevor."

"You're going to make me soggy now if you kiss me all over like that - not that I'm complaining but it's a bit -" He flinched slightly and Hermione blushed, remembering what he'd said about touching him too restlessly.

"I'm sorry," she muttered, "I didn't mean -" and he sighed and tilted her chin up with one long finger - one of the real ones.

"What did I tell you?"

"Not to touch you too-"

"Not that. Perfection not attainable, remember? And the information that you don't intend to live without me is worth a bit of fiddling about."

"I don't _ever_ intend to live without you for more than a few days if I can avoid it," Hermione said seriously.

"I did wonder," Severus said awkwardly, "what with you finishing school soon...."

"But that's one of the beauties of magic," she replied with a smile; "it makes commuting so much easier. Quite apart from... but I don't _ever_ want to live without you, so you have to be careful."

"I can't - you know that I can't promise you my own safety, in the middle of a war. But I _will_ promise you to give my own safety a higher priority than I have done in the past, now that I know... that my survival and my well-being actually matters to somebody. To several somebodies, which is even more astounding, but to you most of all."

"I'm not asking for a guarantee that you'll be safe... just a promise that you'll try. May I?" she asked, leaning towards him, and when he nodded she kissed his eyes lightly, feeling his lashes flutter against her chin. "As I will. And I fully intend to survive this, and engage in a massive reform of social and school policy with you. Because otherwise we'll get bored, once it's all over."

"There's so many injustices and casual cruelties in our little world that ought to be, could be done so much better. Putting them right always seemed like such an overwhelming task there was little point even thinking about it, but with two of us, perhaps we could - make a start, at least. Everything mortal has to start somewhere."

"And we will have the advantage of being Great Heroes," she said cheerfully. "We're bound to, if we survive.... Harry will insist that I do, and I will insist that you do, and then we'll have clout to use to change the world with. Of course, what we do depends on whether you want to keep teaching. Do you?"

"Oh, Lord, Hermione, now you're asking me something. I honestly don't know. I don't know if I'll even be well enough to teach again - realistically. I mean - the limbs, yes, if Sylvanus Kettleburn could do it I'm quite sure I can, but I mean - psychologically. It's not a job for the nervous or the easily undermined.

"And - I always hated teaching. I only did it because being close to Albus made me valuable to, to Him, and because it meant that I could usually get out of taking part in the worst excesses by suggesting that Albus might see what I had done in my mind. It is - it's a ghastly job, really. You stand in front of the class and you give them your best bloody performance and they keep on talking and giggling and ignoring you anyway until you feel so _invisible_, so humiliated; until you lose your temper and shout at them, and then you have their hatred and scorn to keep you company instead.

"Yet, if I leave, who will care for my Slytherins? Especially now, when so many of them are having to make such - deadly choices. And perhaps - perhaps if I become a Great Hero some of the little bastards will actually listen to me. Or perhaps if I could have the DADA post... surely once Riddle is defeated the curse will be ended and Albus will let me have the bloody job that should have been mine seventeen years ago?"

"I think he would surrender the Headmaster's Office to you right now," Hermione said with a smile, "if you asked him. Certainly he'd give you the DADA job, once it's even remotely safe to do so. It would be a shame, though... you were a good Potions teacher, much better than Professor Slughorn. And you could be brilliant, if you tried. That speech you made when we started our first year... you so rarely give us a chance to see that passion and certainty, and you're absolutely riveting when you do. If you did a little more passion and just a bit less venom, you'd be amazing. As it is, nobody ever died in your classes, and only two other Potions teachers in the history of Hogwarts have gone for more than twelve straight years without a fatality. It's a dangerous subject. And I'd quite like to stay. I've had daydreams about teaching at Hogwarts for years." She paused and grinned suddenly. "Guess which subject?"

"Arithmancy?"

"History of Magic. Professor Binns is dreadful... and he hasn't updated his sources in decades. Now, especially, it's a frightfully important subject.... I don't know if you've noticed this, but wizards in general are _appallingly_ ignorant of history in general and modern history in particular. I don't want to hurt Professor Binns' feelings, of course, but he simply isn't up to it, these days. I've always loved history, and I'm sure if it was made more interesting, and more, more _immediate_, people wouldn't sleep through it nearly so much."

"Huh. Old Binnsy could certainly do with livening up, even if he weren't already dead. And you'd probably be a very good teacher, if you think you could cope with being ignored half the time. Bear in mind that you did say that you hated to feel a failure - and students make you feel a failure all the bloody time, in my experience.

"And - I know I'm probably a very bad teacher, but it's difficult - difficult not to become venomous when you feel frightened and humiliated all the time. When I first started teaching I was just twenty-one, and the seniors in my classes had been juniors when _I_ was a senior, and already knew me as the school bullies' favourite butt. It was - nightmarish, seeing them smirking, hearing them whispering 'Snivellus' behind my back, telling the younger ones how they'd seen me - hung up and stripped. I felt as if I was - surrounded by enemies and being held up to ridicule. Again."

Hermione touched his cheek gently, giving him the chance to see it coming and duck if he wanted to, and he gave her a tight smile.

"I did try, I did _try_ to overcome that feeling that I was - surrounded by jackals waiting to pull me down. I did gradually learn, as you say, that if I - if I took the risk of exposing what a bloody geek I was, and tried to show the class what I found so... absorbing about the subject, at least some of them would try to understand and to do genuinely good work. But having Potter and Longbottom in the same bloody class just put the tin lid on it, as far as my nerves were concerned, and sent me right back to where I started. Potter - that sneer, that flaunted disrespect, that - obvious and deliberate decision not to listen to a bloody word I said, coming from that face, it just made me feel that I was sixteen again, trapped in the circle of my enemies and being - "

He stopped. Swallowed. Forced himself to go on. "As for poor Longbottom, he may have a truly delightful personality and a surprizingly good brain, but if ever there was a student who was likely to demolish my unbroken safety-record and the wall with it, he was it. I was on tenterhooks the whole time he was in the classroom - I just kept praying that he wouldn't take me and half the class with him."

"I wasn't just hissing instructions at him for the sake of Gryffindor," Hermione said ruefully. "I know you told me not to help him, but honestly, he might have killed us all if he wasn't being watched every minute, and you had the rest of the class to watch as well. I just had to keep Neville from making too many mistakes... and Harry, who used to start blindly dropping things into his cauldron whenever you said something particularly vicious. He doesn't think very clearly when he's angry, so please be careful about aggravating him if he's holding something fragile. Or dangerous.

"You're not a bad teacher, you know... personally, I don't think I could manage to rule by terror even if I wanted to, I'm too small and fluffy, but you did it quite effectively. We learned a lot, and we learned it quickly, because we didn't dare not to. And if you'd leavened the venom with a little praise when it was earned... I wouldn't say you'd be universally loved, but I'd go as far as 'held in general awe'. You're really _very_ impressive when you lecture, you know." She smiled at him, and he smiled tentatively back, blushing a little. "And I'd love to teach History, if Professor Dumbledore would let me, even if I did have to wind up teaching people who remembered me as a student. I want to stay with you, that's the main thing, but I'd like to be... useful, if I'm going to be here. I get terribly cranky when I've nothing to do."

"Technically I don't think there's any reason why you shouldn't live here and work anywhere within easy Apparition-range, if you don't mind having to walk to and from the gates every day. But it would certainly be - pleasant, to have you as a colleague and be able to sit and drink coffee in the staff-room together. And I don't suppose you would have as much trouble as I did - the female teachers tend to get an easier time of it from the students in any case, and the people who remembered you as a student would remember you as - as bright, brave Hermione, the heroine of the Ministry battle, not the scrawny, greasy geek who was hung up by the heels and stripped in public while he was... in a specifically masculine condition. That was what made it so - degrading, but seeing Lily like that...."

He sighed and rolled over onto his back, pressing the heels of his hands - both the natural and the prosthetic - against his forehead. "I don't know how to do praise, Hermione - I really don't. It's not just that - not just that until these last few months, nobody in my life ever really praised _me_ - well, except for Horace," he added honestly, "who praises almost everybody, and Albus occasionally, telling me how brave I was being - but that was just him being manipulative. That doesn't help, certainly - my opportunities to hear what praise would sound like, even directed towards somebody else, have been strictly limited. But mostly it's cultural. Where I come from, the height of praise is 'Not bad.' Sometimes, I think I _am_ praising my students - by my own standards, I am - but they don't even seem to notice."

"Well, that is a problem, but not an insurmountable one," Hermione said thoughtfully. "We've just got to get the idea circulating among the students. Then the older ones will tell the younger ones as they show up that 'not bad' means you're impressed, and once they get the idea that it's _possible_ to impress you, they'll try harder. Like Professor McGonagall, only more so. We could have the Slytherins start circulating it - the Ravenclaws will listen, and pass it on, and it should filter its way around the school eventually - especially now, when everyone's feeling sympathetic because you're so badly hurt."

She smiled at him faintly, her face full of teasing affection. "And I warn you, there are times when any woman will expect more than a 'not bad', whether it's your way or not."

"You don't think that yowling like a tomcat, taking the Lord's name in vain and shouting _your_ name at a moment of... erotic crisis constitutes praise enough, you insecure baggage?"

"Oh, that will do nicely... but I don't recommend those for those crucial moments when I ask you how my new hairstyle looks. I'm bound to have one at some point."

"But surely the expected male response to that is to grunt 'Very nice, dear' without taking one's eyes off the Quidditch?"

"Well, yes, but that one always ends up with said male sleeping on the couch, at least in the metaphorical sense. A _sensible_ male immediately provides sincere praise in the happy knowledge that this will greatly increase his chances of sex in the immediate future." She grinned at him. "And you know, Ron probably would have grunted 'very nice' without looking.... I think I had rather a lucky escape there, really."

"Oh, he _would_ - and you did." He quirked an amused eyebrow. "But surely you would never banish me to the couch, since you seem to find me so... irresistible?"

"Oh, I would... otherwise you might get the idea that you're so utterly adorable when you do that eyebrow thing that you can get away with absolutely anything." She grinned again, kissing him lingeringly. "It'd be a real struggle, mind, but I'd force myself."

"Doing _what_ eyebrow thing?" he said, doing it. The kiss had made him feel quite breathless again, and embarrassingly eager. "If it would be such a struggle for you to keep your hands off me...." He rolled over onto his stomach and propped himself up on his elbows, both the real and the false, so that he could look down at her. His long hair fell in curtains around his face as he gazed seriously at her suddenly puzzled eyes. "Hermione - are you really serious about - about wanting me to make love to you fully? About wanting me actually to, to take your virginity? Because if you are... serious, Beltane is only a week away, and I can't think of a more auspicious date for it."

Hermione blinked... and then gave him a very bashful smile. "Could we? Really? I'd... I'd love to, I really would. I've told you more than once that I'd never expect anything from you, or ask you if you didn't want to, but if you do... uhm... please?"

He let himself drop forwards so that he was lying on his chest with his head pillowed on his arms, looking at her sideways. "On one level the idea terrifies me," he said candidly, "but I want not to be terrified, I want to be able to overcome it, and I want - very much - to be able to make love to you freely and fully without - without feeling that Lucius and that bloody shower are still exerting control over me. I want to reclaim my own skin, my own body - and then make you a free gift of it, for as long as you continue to enjoy it."

He reached out idly and twirled a strand of her hair around his fingers. "That's not just rhetoric. I want - I need to know that it's my bloody decision who gets to touch me - that way - and who _I_ touch; and my decision is that I want that person to be you." He gave the strand of hair a gentle tug. "Can you contain yourself until Beltane, do you think?"

"I'll do my very best to hold out that long," she agreed, reaching out to brush his hair back from his face gently and steadily, without fussing him. "And you know I'd hold out longer than that if you wanted me to, right? Because I love you, and I don't ever, _ever_ want you to feel as if I'm... like them. But... I do want to. I want you to be... well... the first." She blushed a bit. "Even if I am worried that I'll be bad at it."

"But naïve inexperience is half the charm of a virgin," Severus said with a sly grin. "It makes a man feel very grand and important and wise - and reassures him that she won't be able to tell if he's bad at it. And you've already demonstrated that you're a very quick and very... _thorough_ learner: so think of the fun you're going to have, improving your technique!"

"That is going to be a LOT of fun," she admitted, grinning back. "And I'm sure, as good a teacher as you are, I'll learn a great deal very quickly." She paused, nibbling her lower lip. "And... please don't hesitate to... uhm... give me suggestions?" she said tentatively. "I know it might be difficult, given... well, what you probably associate being told what to do with... but I promise I will not construe suggestions as orders, and I'll probably be grateful for the hints on how to progress."

He winced visibly. "I know you're just running with my own bloody metaphor, but seriously, I don't even want to _think_ about myself as a teacher in this context. Awe and terror and venom are not - not the gifts I want to bring to the bridal bed. And we're going to have to learn together anyway - given that my own experience of consensual sexual intercourse is largely confined to shagging Narcissa Malfoy behind Lucius's back, and frankly, after Lucius anything male with a pulse would feel like Casanova. It doesn't give me a very clear standard against which to measure myself - as it were."

"I do believe that I started out my attempted seduction with the assurance that the way you handle your shrivelfigs alone is a very promising sign," Hermione pointed out, brushing a stray strand of dark hair from his cheek with a featherlight touch. "But I quite like the idea of learning together... I'm told there's always an element of that anyway, since no two partners are ever exactly the same." She paused and frowned. "Although if I'm not better at it than Mrs Malfoy I'm going to be very put out. She always acts as if I smell bad, the few times I've seen her. Whether she ever finds out or not, I'm damn well going to show HER who's better, at least at this."

"My dear good girl" he said, grinning and giving her own hair another slight tug, "you've already proved that you are much better than dear Cissy; like most pure-bloods, she thinks her hands are just there to wave a wand with - and I do mean the wooden kind. Not that - " He frowned, not wanting either to upset Hermione or to be disloyal to a friend. "She's not a bad sort, Narcissa, really she isn't. And she dotes on Draco. She's just.... She never was a very stable girl anyway, and then her parents married her off to Lucius just because he looked like a good catch. And it's not that.... He's not - vicious to her, and believe me I know how vicious he can be," he added with a shudder. "If anything, she rules him. I do believe he thinks that he loves her. But he loves her as he loves his Manor, as he would love a beautiful ornament - something which contributes to his own prestige.

"And so, you see, that's all she has. She has to believe that being a pure-blood makes her _better_ than everybody else, that Muggle-borns are scum, that sleeping with a less-than-half-blood like me is dangerously daring, because otherwise she's just a, a sad, silly woman trapped in a joyless marriage her parents forced her into, waiting to see if her husband's political ambitions will get him killed, and their son along with him."

He sighed and then smiled again. "But be that as it may.... We haven't actually slept together since Draco was an infant, and in any case she was never any competition for you, believe me. You've already proved yourself a ten-times better and more inventive lover - as recently as twenty minutes ago, I do believe... and I do believe you're even more insecure and competitive than I am!"

She blushed. "I really am," she admitted sheepishly. "Uhm. I absolutely hate losing or failing, and... well... I went out with that - McLaggen creature in order to demonstrate to Ron that he wasn't the only one who could attract a complete idiot, and if that's not just stupidly competitive, I don't know what is.... Thank you, though, for the compliments. And I don't... dislike her, exactly, I just can't help being jealous of anyone else you've... well... wanted to be with. Because I know how it feels, to have someone pick someone else... someone stupid and self-absorbed, even... over me, and the thought of going through it again bothers me."

"Hermione - " he started. Sighed. Started again. "My dear girl - credit me with _some_ taste. Believe me, the Lavender Browns of this world couldn't begin to compete with you, in my eyes. Are you likely to run off and leave me for McMillan? And Narcissa - I'm fond of her, I suppose, but we were never in love, or anything like it. We were just - two rather lonely, dissatisfied and sexually frustrated people who happened to have been at school together.... Plus, of course, you will understand that under the circumstances I derived immense and thoroughly malicious pleasure from cuckolding Lucius without his knowledge!"

She laughed at that last. "I'm sure you did, o sneaky Slytherin. And I don't... really worry about it, not with you, it's just that the previously instilled insecurities do prickle sometimes. And she is prettier than me," she added rather sheepishly. "I know it's silly to let that bother me, but sometimes it does. I can't imagine her ever holding you through one of your nightmares, though." She curled closer to him, resting her cheek against his arm, warm and alive and slightly furry against her skin. "I love you," she said softly. "And I want to keep that particular part of your heart all for myself.... just as, I hope, you want to keep that part of mine."

"Oh, Lord, yes. I mean, if you loved somebody else I'd, I'd forgive you, I'd think it was understandable, even - but I'd be absolutely sure you'd prefer them over me and leave me, and then I'd be miserable and probably horrible, and drive you away anyway. Best all round if you love only me forever and ever, I think."

He rolled over onto his side so that he could get at her better to kiss her, and looked at her candidly. "If I am honest, I have to say that Cissy _would_ hold me through a nightmare - but she'd be terribly sentimental and tragic about it afterwards, and make me feel about five years old and five inches high. She's kind enough, at least in intention - but she doesn't have your humour or, or anything like your sparkle. And - you said it yourself, if you'd wanted a pretty-boy you could have had one for the asking. Narcissa may - conform more closely to the traditional idea of prettiness than you do, but if I'm going to be spending a substantial part of my life looking at someone's face, which I hope and intend that I am, I want that face to be full of interest and character; not just a, a bland, unchanging Sindy doll. And you, at least, never look as if you've swallowed a wasp. Credit me with having as much ability as yourself to prefer true substance over mere window-dressing!"

Hermione beamed, tearing up just a little bit. "I would... very much like to spend as much of my life as possible looking at your face," she admitted. "And I can't imagine loving anyone else in at all the same way as I love you. You're... complicated and prickly and fascinating and very sweet at times, and you have this tendency to make other men seem simple and flat and rather boring by comparison." Narcissa was, suddenly, entirely unimportant. And perhaps an object of pity, for having been foolish enough to give him up. "It would be like... like going back to playing jacks, after learning chess. Although I'm awful at chess," she added honestly.

"That's one of the things - one of the many things which annoy me about Weasley. The fact that he's so good at chess proves he does _have_ a brain, and it's not as if - well, he's not autistic, or anything like that. It's not that he has this one island of brilliance and is otherwise retarded. He's just too bloody lazy to apply his brain to anything that doesn't immediately interest him." He reached out and doodled gently on the skin of her arm with his fingernail. "But I suppose I should be glad he is lazy, since his loss is my gain. If he'd been a little more on the ball he might already have swept you off your feet and carried you off to his lair - instead of you coming freely into mine."

"Ron may be able to play chess, but what he _is_ is Gobstones," Hermione said firmly. "Simple, direct, requiring skilled handling and prone to making a huge mess of everything. You, on the other hand... you are three-dimensional chess, full of surprises and layers and a tendency to suddenly move the entire conflict to a different playing field altogether." She giggled a little as the doodling tickled the sensitive skin inside her elbow. "I would have grown out of Ron, I think... I can't imagine ever doing that with you."

"And I can't tell you how relieved I am to hear you say it. Seriously."

* * *

**Author's note:**

With reference to the previous chapter, an e-mailless person called Ishfet wanted to know why I had made Severus Catholic, and why Hermione had been given a mixed Quaker and Jewish background which would be "exoticism squared" in a secular British society.

To begin with, I make Severus vaguely Catholic in my stories because of his very un-British colouring. Recent immigrants aside, in nearly all cases Britons who have dark hair and dark eyes also have quite dark skin, and Britons who have dark hair and fair skin have pale eyes (John Nettleship, the guy on whom Snape was mainly based, actually has black hair, fairish skin and grey eyes). The fact that Snape has black hair, black eyes and ivory skin suggests that a major part of his genetic origin is probably either North African or Spanish. I don't know enough about Islam to write him convincingly as a Moslem, even a lapsed one, and to write him as a Moroccan Christian really _would_ be distractingly exotic; hence I write him as of part Spanish extraction, and Spaniards are usually Catholics. Also, most of my family are (Irish) Catholic, even though I'm not, so it's a background I can write without having to faff about doing a lot of research.

As for Hermione, "Granger" sounds as if it could as easily be Germanic as native, and a high proportion of Britons of German origin are Jews. A high proportion of British dentists have also traditionally been Jews - try Googling "The Jones Dental Dynasty". But I felt that if she actually was Jewish as such, even if very assimilated, there would have been some mention of it in canon; so I made her only part Jewish. I made the other part Quaker because Dyce, who writes most of Hermione for this story (as well as other bits such as most of the Slytherin common-room sequence, and most of the card-game in this chapter), is a Quaker and her attitudes will inform her interpretation of Hermione. I was surprised btw that anyone could consider that either Jews or Quakers were "exotic".

As for the secular British society, I don't know where Ishfet is from but the way it works is that even though most Britons are not religious at all, religious identity tends to be something you are born into. A high proportion of Britons do identify culturally with the religion of their forefathers and will say "I'm Catholic/C of E/Quaker" or whatever, even if they haven't seen the inside of a church since their cousin Alice's wedding in 1983. Even though I personally am a practising pagan, and my mother gave up Catholicism before I was born, I still identify myself as "of Catholic origin", and were I to take an interest in football I would automatically support a Catholic team (football in Scotland is very much divided along sectarian grounds).

Anyway, Mediaeval castles do have chapels, and even if only one student in every fifteen or twenty has any sort of religious belief, that still means there are around forty students with a professed religion, of whom probably about twenty-five will be some sort of Christian; so there would be sufficient demand to keep the Hogwarts chapel in use.

**Elizabeth Spiers** - I wrote a long reply to your review but the email address you included with it doesn't work. Could you send it again? Or email me direct at **whitehound at madasafish dot com**.

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"An eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg" - from the early 19th C Irish anti-recruitment song _Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye_.

Widge is a Derbyshire dialect word for a penis - also called a widgie in other areas of the north of England.

Sindy is a British equivalent of the Barbie doll, first produced in the 1960s. She was originally more girl-next-door and less glamorous than Barbie, but still rather vacuous and bland.

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Note that the conversation between Snape and Flitwick about fitting him for prostheses in chapter #08, and between Snape and Hooch about how well he is managing the prostheses in chapter #15, have been re-edited to add comments about Sylvanus Kettleburn, Hagrid's predecessor as Care of Magical Creatures master. It was mentioned _en passant_ in _The Tales of Beedle the Bard_ that Professor Kettleburn had had only one and a half natural limbs left during the whole of the time that he worked for Dumbledore, so it seemed natural that Snape, being similarly maimed, would think about his former colleague. So you don't have to re-read whole chapters just to find out what's been added, the alterations are as follows:

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

"You really think you'll be able to make something that will - that will enable me to walk, at least?" Sylvanus Kettleburn had been similarly injured, and had coped so well with his prostheses that he had continued to teach for thirty years after his right arm was ripped away by a manticore, which he had been belabouring with one of his rosewood legs at the time, wielding it like a club. But Sylvanus had been fitted for false limbs within hours of losing the originals, while those limbs were still a clear part of his body's morphic field: not months after the event, when all that was left was a dull, healed-over stump which had forgotten how to be anything else.

"Oh yes - in time. But it won't be simple. Alastor, for example, he still has his own leg to just below the knee so the wooden limb requires no - no articulation, beyond the charm which makes the claws shape themselves to the ground. But a whole leg or arm - one that's actually real and fixed, that won't evaporate when the spell wears off and that's integrated into your own nervous system, as Alastor's eye is - that's going to take time. And I imagine you'll want something a bit more... realistic."

"If I had lost both legs at the hip it might have been interesting to end up with - with eagle's claws, or some such. I could really _disturb_ all the little first-years, if I had talons." Sylvanus's habit of taking his false legs off in the middle of morning coffee-break and scratching the stumps luxuriously had also been pretty disturbing, if one thought about it - although he tried fervently not to. "But since I still have one leg to the knee I shall be content to be as, as human as I ever was; and I emphatically do not want to end up looking like a collection of spare parts flung together by a Victorian cabinet-maker."

**-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-**

Although he was perversely reluctant to admit it, privately he knew she was right. He might still be as wobbly and prone to collapse as a liquorice crutch but the more he practised walking - if you could call it that - the more he could feel what was left of the muscles around his left hip beginning to live and to move again. Even if he could still manage no more than a stiff-legged shuffle, swinging the prosthetic leg forwards without bending the knee. He could believe, now, at least, that he would some day be able to shamble adequately through his life like Sylvanus Kettleburn, although whether he would ever regain the silken stalk which had terrorised nearly a whole generation of nervous first-years was another matter.


	25. 22 Guilt Edged Bonds

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

* * *

**22: GUILT-EDGED BONDS**

"I suppose," he observed glumly, "that if I do let Adrian and Poppy write me up, I'm going to have to tell them about my, ah... about Hermione. You know what I mean, Minerva."

"I hae the glimmerings o' an idea. But if they've got this far without discerning your guilty secret, they can continue to not discern it, surely."

"That isn't the point. We're talking about something which may be used as a precedent for treating other victims of - of such attacks, and which will at least endeavour to approximate to scientific truth. Under the circumstances, leaving out important information would be falsification - it would be intellectually dishonest, and it might make the account of my treatment, my recovery, less valid as a tool for treating others." And the more he thought about it, the more he hated the idea of lying to Adrian, even by omission.

He held up his hand to forestall the obvious comment, whether she had been going to make it or not. "Lies and deceit were my stock-in-trade, as a spy, but I never lied out of mere self-interest, and to other people's detriment: and if the thing isn't going to be either accurate or useful, there's no point in doing it at all. No, this... facet of my treatment, my recovery, will have to be at least mentioned - without naming names, of course." He grimaced. "And you know what that means."

Minerva bit the head off a ginger newt with precise malice. "You're going to have to break it to the old goat before he reads it in the _Prophet_, or he'll lay an egg."

"He will anyway."

"A belated Easter egg, I imagine, painted with puce and lemon stripes. Do you want me to do the honours?"

"No I - I'm not going to skulk as if I'm ashamed of it. Even if I am."

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Talking to Albus wasn't the only encounter to be dreaded. Walking unsteadily but with increasing confidence towards a meeting to discuss his own security, with Draco surreptitiously hovering at his elbow, he rounded a corner and found himself eyeball to eyeball with Parvati Patil; who stared at him with a doe-eyed, wounded look which made him cringe.

"P-Professor Snape" she said uncertainly, backing up. His eyes took in the hacked-short hair, which had been tidied into a bob during her visit home, and the grey unhealthy tint underlying the usual chestnut of her skin. The blasted girl looked as if she hadn't slept for a month.

"Miss Patil." How she must hate him, the cause of her sister's ruin: but he was damned if he was going to roll over and show his belly like a frightened pup. He had spent his life consigning people who thought he was a friend to Azkaban, in any case, and it never got any easier.

"I - I wanted to come and see you, Professor, but I -" Tears welled in the brown eyes. "I was too ashamed...." she finished, almost too quiet to hear.

"Don't be. Please. It wasn't your fault." He looked at her curiously. "I thought that you might blame me for... for what happened to your sister."

"Oh _no_ I - you weren't to blame because P-Padma hated me so much that she, she -" Her voice threatened to break down into a wail. "I'm so s-sorry for what she did to you and I thought you must hate me too -"

Draco coughed. "If Se- if Professor Snape thought like that he certainly wouldn't be talking to me: my father did - did a lot worse than Padma."

"But it's m-my fault, sh-she hated me so much that she did such a wicked th-thing, and now she's, she's never coming home, she'll die in Azkaban and I'll never see her again -"

"Miss Patil!" Severus said sternly. "Listen to me. You are right to grieve for your sister, but you mustn't blame yourself because of the bad choices which she made. No-one knows better than I that tee- that young persons may be led astray by Tom Riddle and his hollow promises. Or that the consequences can be - disastrous."

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"Lupin's right," growled Moody, studiously not meeting Severus's eye - a thing for which Severus was on the whole grateful. Even after all that had happened last year, he still associated the paranoid old bastard with memories which made him shudder and flush with shame. "If Snape's going to be walking about whenever he feels like it, multiple copies of the Marauder's Map are a good way to monitor everyone who goes near him, without an attacker being able to silence the people doing the watching."

"I don't really like the idea that someone will be watching me even when I'm in the lavvie or the shower," Severus muttered, "but I suppose it's no worse than having my guards follow me to the door."

"Do I understand that there were blank patches on the original map?" Filius asked in his high, precise voice. "Spaces into which the person using the map could not see?"

"Yes." Remus nodded vigorously. "It couldn't see the Chamber of Secrets because it didn't register as really part of the castle - it wasn't in the castle's morphic field. And we deliberately tweaked it so it wouldn't see into Hagrid's hut because he didn't like the idea of people watching him all the time, either. But we can adjust that: and making new copies for security surveillance is easy. We each had our own copy in any case, although mine, which Filch confiscated, was the only one to survive: the others were lost with their owners, one way or another."

"The more security, the better," Mad-Eye Moody said gruffly. He looked up, meeting Severus's gaze directly for the first time since he had sneered at the young ex-Death Eater coughing up blood on the floor of a Ministry holding cell, nearly seventeen years ago. Severus was surprised to see embarrassment and even guilt there, insofar as it was possible to tell past the distraction of the eponymous mad eye. "Voldemort is bound to take Snape's recovery as a challenge: we don't want any of those bastards trying to take up again where they left off."

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"I appreciate the fact that you were, ah, defending my honour, Battersby, but don't do it in the corridor unless you're sure no one else can see you. Five points from Slytherin for getting caught. You'd better take that ear to Madam Pomfrey - no, on second thoughts...."

Battersby gazed at him with wide-eyed, unnerving, squeaky thirteen-year-old adulation as Severus carved the air with his wand, singing a lilting buzz of magic under his breath, and the split ear ceased bleeding and began to reseal itself.

"Thank you sir," the third-year boy breathed: "I promise I won't do it again, sir."

"What won't you do, Battersby?"

"Get caught, sir."

"Correct. Oh, and Battersby?"

"Yessir?"

"Five points to Slytherin for a well-performed Furnunculus hex, and serve Yaxley right for not picking on someone his own size."

"Yessir. Being small makes me harder to hit, sir!"

"God!" he said shakily, when his fan-club had taken himself off to double Herbology: "I should have stayed in bed."

"What was that, then?" Adrian asked, peacefully steadying his friend by the elbow. "Was that magic, leik, or some sort of infection?"

"Magic," Severus replied tersely. "They had an argument apparently - about me! - and Yaxley, the big boy, tried to use a Slicing Hex - a Slicing Hex, on a third year!" He had, he remembered uneasily, used Sectumsempra on a schoolmate himself - but that had been carefully controlled, and against a member of a gang of boys his own age who had launched an unprovoked attack on him, and at least one of whom had previously tried to kill him. "Battersby countered with a hex that raises boils, as you saw."

He was glad that it was Horace, not himself, who would have the task of disciplining Yaxley - a convinced Voldemort supporter, a sworn enemy who wished his House Master to be given back to the torturers, and yet a near-child for whose safety and well-being that House Master was responsible. It would be horrendous to have to decide between being over-harsh, or being too lenient in an effort _not_ to be over-harsh.

"So this Slicing Hex, that's like using a flick knife?"

"Mmm, except it can be projected at a distance. And like a physical knife, it can be used defensively, but Yaxley - I don't believe he could have felt Battersby was going to do him serious harm. His uncle is a Death Eater and... very fond of knives of all kinds." Unconsciously, he touched the scars which extended from the corners of his mouth. "The boy just wants to follow in his uncle's literally bloody footsteps, I imagine."

"D'you want me to sort him out?" Millie Bulstrode, his guard for the afternoon, cracked her knuckles ominously. Draco had been sent to escort Yaxley to the hospital wing and make sure he didn't either collapse on the way, or do a runner; and Leon Jaquin was some distance behind them, acting as a rear-guard.

"That's - good of you to offer, Bulstrode, but I don't want you getting yourself arrested so soon before your NEWTs. It's bad enough that you're wasting time on me when you could be studying."

"That's all right, sir - he could be part of my practical Defence project."

"Just - let him know you're considering it." He detached his elbow from Adrian's supportive grip and took a step forwards, towards the steps which led down to the sanctuary of his own rooms: but his foot misjudged the distance to the edge, it still hadn't the sensitivity that flesh and blood would have had, the false knee failed to lock and in an instant he was falling forwards, face down; the dark edges of the steps were rushing up to smash him into oblivion and then he collided embarrassingly with Bulstrode's warm, padded bosom and half slid from her grasp to crash down on one knee - the prosthetic one, which was something, but the blow jarred through his much-abused hip and all the way up his spine until his teeth clacked together like gunshot.

"Fuck! Severus!" Adrian was beside him in one annoyingly elastic bound. "Are you all right, man?"

"Yes I - all right, I think." He felt light-headed, and was afraid he was going to be sick, but nothing seemed to be broken. Above him, Jaquin appeared at the top of the steps, flicking his chestnut curls back behind his rather large ears and striking a consciously heroic "on guard" pose in the smoky torch-light.

Severus accepted the hand-up which Addy offered him. "Thanks. And thank you, Miss Bulstrode: your reflexes are admirably quick."

It was a novelty to find himself wobbly with shock over something which was in the present and not directly part of his torture. As he tried to steady himself the join between flesh and falsehood gave at the hip again and he almost measured his length, there at the bottom of the steps. "Shite!" He grabbed at the curly bracket of the nearest torch to steady himself. "Addy I - I don't know if I can do this, my hip - not working."

"That's all right, man, you can borrow my shoulder instead. It was working before, wasn't it? You'll just have shaken it loose, or something - come on, you can lean on me -"

"But it's always - going to - fucking - come loose." White rage rose up like a sudden tide and overwhelmed him, and he hammered his fist against the wall with a wail of despair. "Broken - broken like a fucking puppet and where's the rest of me, my feet, my hand I can't be this, this thing, this half-of-nothing stumbling bloody _wreckage_ -" He choked, feeling his chest constrict, and wondered distantly if he were having a heart attack.

Behind the pounding of his own blood in his ears he heard Adrian saying "Sev, steady, take a breath!" and Bulstrode's voice exclaiming "Professor!" but he was blinded by his own sudden tears: by overwhelming grief for the part of him that was lost.

"Oh, God, I can't, where have I gone, they took me - I used to, to hold her hand when we were children, I walked in the stream barefoot but they cut me up and took my feet away and what gave them the right, the right, Yaxley, Pettigrew, Macnair to cut me apart and fucking disjoint me like a fucking side of meat -" He slammed his hand against the wall again, so hard that the flames danced.

"Shh." Adrian made a firm attempt to gather him in and embrace him, although he was so much shorter that Severus ended up with his chin resting on the other man's woolly curls. "Nothing gave them the right - they had no right. They were just - thieves, leik. Breathe for me now, good man."

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After an anxious case-conference, with Severus by now rather sulkily stretched out on the bed in his quarters while the experts poked and prodded, Filius declared that the development of a callous over the hollow where the younger man's hip-joint had been was interfering with the neurological feed into the false leg. He proceeded to adjust the disturbing-looking limb, tut-tutting to himself as he set it to bending at the knee and wiggling its toes, all alone on the table yards away from its owner.

"I half expect him to produce a sonic screwdriver," Adrian muttered. "That's -"

"I remember. Lily and I used to watch it at her place - from behind the sofa."

Adrian gave him a wry, sideways look. "I'll tell you what, man - I couldn't not notice that even when you were hyperventilating and hammering on the wall, you were doing it with the artificial hand...."

"Of course. Half out of my mind I may be, but I'm not _stupid_."

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To Hermione, who was bound to find out about it in any case, he explained his wild outburst of grief and rage as a simple panic attack brought on by frustration and the shock of the fall; although she looked at him dubiously, and he feared that she was unconvinced. When he suggested to her that it might be time to spill the beans about their relationship to Albus, she began chewing her own hair without apparently noticing that she was doing it, but she agreed that it would be a relief not to feel any longer that she was deceiving the Headmaster. With a nervous, almost hysterical giggle she added that it wouldn't be half as bad as breaking it to Harry and Ron.

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"Albus I -" He put the essay he'd been marking down on his desk, and cleared his throat. "This is - difficult but - please don't be too angry, but I have a confession to make."

"I'm sure it's nothing too bad, dear boy," the Headmaster murmured, without taking his eyes off the pages of _Knit-Wits' Monthly_. "I find your sins are seldom so grave as you imagine." He dabbed his fingertip against his tongue and used it to turn the page. "Ah, Fair Isle socks! So, what is it you wished to tell me?"

Severus drew a deep breath. "Hermione Granger and I are having an affair. We haven't technically had sex yet, but we fully intend to."

Albus blinked, lowering his magazine slowly. He closed it, laying it tidily in his lap, before turning to look over his spectacles at Severus with the penetrating look that he knew perfectly well still turned every present or former student to jelly. "I'm sorry, Severus, perhaps I misheard. Did you just tell me that you have been... 'carrying on' with Miss Granger?"

The surge of irritation which had impelled Severus to speak so bluntly dried on his tongue and left him struggling not to stammer. "I, um, it's not - not as shallow as that makes it sound. It's - we're - serious."

"Indeed." Albus frowned, bushy eyebrows lowering. "Yes, well, a teacher - even a temporarily incapacitated one - engaging in any form of romantic relations with a student _is_ very serious, as I am quite sure you are aware. Whatever possessed you, Severus? And..." He paused, an unwelcome realization dawning. "For how long has this been going on?"

"Since early March - although I'm given to understand that she had been, um, interested in me since early in December."

"I do hope you're not going to suggest that Miss Granger seduced you."

"We seduced each other," Severus said wretchedly. "And I'm not - not a teacher any more, or I wasn't then anyway, and at the time I didn't think I ever would be or I wouldn't have -" He realised that he was gabbling, but it was very hard not to. "What _possessed_ me was realising that for the first time in my life an attractive girl who wasn't a Death Eater was interested in me - that way - just when I thought no one would bear to look at me again ever and finding out that she - that I could talk to her without having to bloody simplify all the time to suit somebody else's limited intellect and she -" He drew breath, almost choking. "...that she was my equal or my better in so many ways," he finished quietly.

Albus cleared his throat. "Yes, well... Miss Granger is a charming and intelligent young woman, of sterling character, and I can... understand that, given the close proximity the two of you have been in these last months...." His voice was _almost_ convincingly calm and understanding, with only the faintest thread of annoyance. "However, to follow through on that attraction, while you are both still members of this school... the last thing we need now, Severus, is a scandal. If anyone found out...." His eyes narrowed again. "As I'm sure at least one or two persons must have, by now. Would you be kind enough to enlighten me as to who knows?"

"Well, um, Neville Longbottom - he realised that there was a potential um, attraction there even before I did - and I'm fairly sure that Miss Lovegood has worked it out although she hasn't said anything specific."

"To be sure." Albus nodded thoughtfully. "They are both very observant young persons."

"Then, ah, I had to tell Draco because Pansy Parkinson had already worked it out and I wanted him to hear it from me first, and I'm not sure if Pansy told anybody else but Minerva had a word with her about it and she said -"

"'Minerva had a word with her'? Am I to understand that you informed Professor McGonagall, but not...?" He looked away for a moment, clearly collecting himself. "There is at least a chance, I suppose, that your Slytherins - given their oath of fealty - will not risk causing you trouble by spreading this particular gossip any further. As rash as I still believe that action to have been, at least there may be some benefit to it now." He looked at Severus again, disappointment clear in his face. "It is still a very grave risk which you have taken, quite apart from the ethical considerations, and if you were unable to work that out for yourself then Minerva should have warned you - seeing that you saw fit to confide in her."

"I didn't," Severus muttered. "She worked it out for _her_self, from observation. I hadn't intended to tell her either, at that stage: it was all so - so uncertain, so delicate, that I was afraid to upset the balance."

Albus made a sour face. "She worked it out? Whereas I did not, it seems. I appear to have been lax once again, in regards to you." He sighed. "Oh, don't make that face. I didn't mean that I should have been watching you in case you made trouble - although this might certainly do it! But I should have been more observant of your emotional state. That _is_ why I'm sitting here with you, after all, and yet I didn't notice a thing. Tch." He shook his head, looking absurdly like an elderly, disapproving saint out of a stained-glass window. Only the magazine spoiled the image. "But you really ought to have told me, Severus. As Miss Granger's Headmaster, and your employer, not to mention your friend...."

"I don't know if you are my employer any more - I don't know what I am now, or whether I shall teach again in the future. And I don't know what - what information one should give to a friend. Not being used yet to having any. Before - before all this, if I tried to talk about anything difficult you either ignored me or raged at me and I know that things are different now but I don't know it enough to rely on, and Minerva said that what you didn't know wouldn't hurt you...."

"It could hurt me very much, if I were to find myself confronting a furious parent or governor about a scandal I knew nothing about. I shall have this out with Minerva later. I cannot be too angry with yourself or Miss Granger, seeing that you apparently had the Deputy Headmistress's sanction for this... escapade: but she should not have given you her sanction for something so irregular without consulting me first."

The stern look shaded into an expression of wounded dignity. "And I know that in the past I have not always shown you the consideration you deserved, but things are, as you yourself admit, different now. I confess that I am - hurt, Severus, to think that you concealed something so fundamental from me. These past six months, I had come to regard you almost as a son."

Severus raised one long eyebrow. "And did you always discuss the details of your sex life with your father?"

"My father died in Azkaban when I was twelve."

"Oh. I'm - very sorry. I hadn't heard."

"There is much about me that you haven't heard, but right now we are concerned with what I hadn't heard. Stick to the point, Severus."

"Then I will rephrase my question - did you discuss your adolescent fumblings with your mother? Or other surviving older relation?"

"Certainly... not. Very well. I do take your point. But really, Severus - even if you are not currently or officially a teacher at this school you have been one until very recently. You must have realised that skulking around with a current student was... inappropriate, and yet you say you are planning to take the matter further. I must insist -"

"I'm _not_ her teacher," Severus snapped, "and you are not my employer at present - at least I, I don't think so. I don't mean... I would not wish to reject your friendship but if I have to choose between you and Hermione.... She wants it to be permanent, Albus, and I find I want that too."

The old man's expression softened slightly, though he still looked disapproving. "And I am... not unaware of how much that must mean to you," he said quietly. "To have found... someone." Someone who is not Lily, his tone said.

Severus rubbed his face tiredly with his hands, unconsciously tracing the lines bisecting his cheeks. "I - we - haven't discussed marriage as such but we don't intend to keep it secret once - once I am fit to be seen in public, and we did discuss the fact that I was her teacher up until last year, with each other and with Minerva. I'm not teaching or marking her, so I can't be said to have any power over her schooling, and as for awing her into bed with the knowledge that I used to be her teacher, the fact that I've spent six months dependent on her charity even to go to the bloody lavatory...."

"I would certainly prefer that you had _postponed_ this development until she finishes her schooling, but the heart does as it wills, as I am well aware. However, though I acknowledge your point about discussing one's sexual escapades with one's parents, as the person who will have to handle the media frenzy if this ever gets out, I _would_ have appreciated being told earlier. And it would be a frenzy, Severus - I'm sure you remember the hysteria over Harry Potter's love-life during the Tri-Wizard Tournament, and this would be more thrilling still."

"Oh Lord, Albus - I'd forgotten about the way Skeeter tried to paint Hermione as some sort of Scarlet Woman toying with Potter's adolescent affections...." He thought about that for a moment. "Still, she, er, she has a certain _influence_ over Skeeter which she didn't have before - please don't ask me what, but I'm fairly certain she can strong-arm Skeeter into playing the story as a slightly irregular engagement rather than a five-star scandal. I, um, I do intend to make a public announcement at some point, so that the whole thing is above board and the parents are reassured that I am... that my relationship is all with Hermione and I'm not some predatory seducer who's going to debauch their acne-ridden brats." He grimaced. "That's one of the advantages to my being a Slytherin - half the pure-blood girls get engaged while they're at school anyway, although not usually to a former teacher, and the Slytherin parents won't have a problem with the idea that I might be out for what I can get.

"By announcing it ourselves we can control the publicity to some extent, and at least prevent it from being portrayed as some sort of clandestine intrigue." He met the other man's hard blue gaze at last. "But don't ask me to end it, because that isn't on offer."

"Well, at least you've considered some of the ramifications." Albus nodded, and then twinkled at Severus almost benignly. "And I will not ask you how Miss Granger has managed to gain influence over Ms Skeeter, though I am immensely curious. But do keep in mind that Ms Skeeter is not the _Daily Prophet_'s only reporter, and that others may muckrake even if she will not." He shook his head. "I will only implore you to be careful, Severus... for her sake, as well as your own. I would not like to see Miss Granger's undoubted competence and scholarly ability called into question by... unfortunate implications."

"If you're trying to emotionally-blackmail me into giving her up, old man, it won't work. Adrian, Poppy and I are planning to write a paper about my... my experiences, my treatment and recovery, and it will have to mention the fact that I have, um, begun to _recover_ sexually, if it is to be accurate enough to be useful." He gave an almost-laugh which turned into a cough. "Enough people already know enough to work out that it must refer to Hermione, and she would look far worse if it appeared that our relationship was a, a casual fling, or something covert that we were ashamed of. She would be accused of toying with my affections, as they imagine she did with Potter's."

He favoured the other man with a tight, mirthless smile. "No, Albus, even though I am - less than happy with my own rôle in this, at this point the only thing to be done is to brazen it out and admit to it publicly - at some point after Hermione informs those two oiks she hangs around with, and before her NEWTs, so there can be no accusations of secret favouritism. All she gets from me academically is support and, and a certain amount of coaching, which only puts her on a level playing-field with my Slytherins anyway, and I won't have anyone suggesting that I influenced her results in any other way."

"I'm not trying to blackmail you, Severus... just to caution you to be very careful. Both in whom you allow to find out before you announce this, and how you word that announcement. I'm sure you know that both of you will be under a great deal of scrutiny." Albus opened his magazine again. "I would suggest, perhaps, that you stifle your loathing for sentiment, this once, and allow the matter to be presented as a great romance... she, tending your heroic but shattered form, yearning to be by your side forever but determined to return you to health, as your lonely heart was warmed by her tender compassion - " He broke off with a chuckle at the look on Severus's face. "Yes, I know, but treacle sells almost as many newspapers as scandal... especially treacle from you, who has always loathed it so."

"It would be easier to take if it wasn't so accurate," Severus muttered. "I dispute 'heroic', but the rest is too close for comfort. I dislike the idea of taking something so genuine and making it look so - so _plastic_, excuse the Muggleism, but if that's what it takes to have a love-life without ruining Hermione's reputation, or the school's...."

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"At any rate, it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd feared. He was playing the 'more in sorrow than in anger' card which, believe me, is preferable to the other way round."

"I suppose that's something." Hermione had been sorting her Ancient Runes notes, spreading them out on any unoccupied portion of mattress, but she paused to smile at him. "I'm not quite looking forward to the next time I see him, but I think I'm glad that we don't have to worry about him finding out from someone else, anymore. Are you?"

"Very." Severus shuddered. "You seem much more _blasé_ about it than I expected, given that you started eating that explosion you call your hair when I told you I was planning to tell him about it. " He levered himself up stiffly from the couch and crossed the room to join her. "What's that you've got there?"

"I'm not _blasé_, I'm just trying awfully hard to be... I don't know, mature and calm about it." She made a face, putting down the pile and shifting to make room for him as he sat down on the edge of the bed. "Chewing on my hair and getting all worked up about it made me feel... silly, afterwards. And I don't want you to think I'm silly, just because the thought of Professor Dumbledore knowing that I've fallen madly in love with a former teacher makes me feel all... cold and squirmy." She smiled ruefully. "Like Trevor, when the huge and terrifying Potions master is about to revert him to a tadpole."

"Trevor is actually disturbingly warm, except for his feet. I was afraid for a moment that Albus would try to split us up and I was going to have to fight for you tooth and nail - but fortunately I was able to point out that enough people knew or suspected about the relationship already that parting us would have made you look like some sort of fickle Jezebel, or me like a cold-hearted seducer, which would be much worse than just admitting we were serious about each other. Not that I would have let him - split us up, I mean. Is that your NEWT project?"

"No, just my notes for Ancient Runes. I made an _awful_ mistake on my Ancient Runes OWL, and if I did the same on my NEWT...." She actually shuddered, thinking of it. "And if he'd tried to separate us, I would have fought too... and Slytherin would probably have risen up in revolt." She leaned over the bed to kiss him lightly on the cheek, and went back to sorting her notes. "I'm really behind on my revision... I'd get more done if I wasn't trying to study with Harry and Ron, but if I don't they'll just start slacking off and making mistakes, and I know you said I shouldn't fuss over them so much but school's nearly _over_, and I'll probably never have another chance, and I _will_ miss it...." She pulled her study timetable out of her pocket, and started tapping the piles of notes with her wand, colour-coding them to match the timetable.

"What will you miss? Coaching those two lunkheads - of which I can but say, rather you than me? Studying itself?" He pushed Crookshanks firmly towards the middle of the bed, so that he could slide under the covers and lean back against the raised pillows with his fingers, both the real and the false, laced behind his head. Much to his chagrin, an afternoon nap was still a necessity, and the day was too wet for dozing on the lawn. "And you can't have made too bad a mistake at OWL" he added, amused: "You did get an 'Outstanding', as I recall."

"Oh, it really was dreadful... I got so nervous that I confused _ehwaz_ with _eihwaz_, and I didn't realize until afterwards... oh, I was so annoyed with myself! And I'd been studying like mad, then, for weeks and weeks; I'll probably do something even worse this time!" Her voice had got a bit shrill, and she fiddled with her timetable. "I really will miss Harry and Ron dreadfully, and looking after them and everything, but if they make me fail my NEWTs because they're not taking it seriously I'm going to turn them both into weasels!"

"Which I'm sure will be a vast improvement. I find it helps if you concentrate on associating the characteristics of the runes with their visual appearance, not with their name as it is written in English." He frowned at her. "Really, Hermione, you must know that your encyclopaedic memory is already very well-stocked. If there's any room for improvement - or any risk of failure, and by failure I mean 'less than a hundred per cent perfect score' - it's in the need to calm down and really understand a question, instead of grabbing wildly at the surface of it. And you won't do that if you're panicking."

"But I'm so _behind_!" Hermione's voice rose, and then she bit her lip. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to shout, but... oh, I hate exams, I always get so nervous! I want to get everything perfect so badly, but I can't help getting more and more nervous, and then I'm sure I'll fail everything!" Her hands twisted together anxiously, badly crumpling the timetable. "I just wish it was all _over_."

"Hermione - Hermione, listen to me!" He heaved himself forwards, still rather stiffly, and seized both her hands in his, holding them apart and stroking the backs of them with his thumbs. "Hardly anybody ever does a perfect exam, not even Dumbledore: there are always momentary lapses, errors of concentration in any long piece of writing. But that's expected. No-one is going to think that you're a, a bad student if you don't score a hundred per cent on every single paper. And you don't need to. You already know what you need to know: this last term is just for refreshing your memory and polishing the details of your practical performance."

"But the NEWTs are so _important_!" Hermione clung to his hands, trying and failing to bring her voice down from a frightened squeak. "They affect our... our careers, and our futures, and _everything_, and what if I make some dreadful mistake and I... I fail Potions, or something? I'd never be able to face you again, after you've done so much to help, and I want you to be proud of me, and Mum and Dad too, of course, and...." She trailed off, as if that was too much even to hope for.

"You aren't going to fail Potions, unless you have some sort of total mental breakdown - and if you did, you would be allowed to re-sit. I would be - disappointed, if you didn't get your Special Merit, because it would mean that your marks did not do justice to your ability or to the effort which you have put in - not because I thought your ability or your diligence weren't worth good marks. I wouldn't rage at you or anything like that. Especially as a poor mark would be considered to reflect on Horace, not on me...." He coughed delicately.

"In any case you're not a - a machine for passing exams. The school aims to educate you to the best of your abilities, and your abilities are very high, but there's so much more to you than that. How could I not be proud of a, a brave loving girl who was willing to commit herself to a sour, ill-favoured cripple like me, knowing what will be involved and still tolerating my tantrums and traumas?"

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed the back of it, and then cleared his throat awkwardly, feeling himself blush. "And I'm sure your parents are already proud of you, and from what you tell me, they wouldn't understand enough about our world to know whether you'd done well in your exams or not."

"You're not ill-favoured, and you're much less sour than you were, now...." That distracted her from the panic, a little, and she leaned in to kiss him gently in return, although he had to stoop low over their joined hands to allow it. "And I love you, you know I do. And I want to make you proud of me because I do well, because I'm... I don't know, because I have some chance of being your intellectual equal, someday, even if I'm not now." She smiled wryly. "And my parents know the difference between a pass and a fail, believe me, no matter what letter codes they use. Being a prefect and passing my exams is really all they _do_ understand about what I'm doing. They know I'm happy, though, and that's important."

"I'm glad - that you're happy, I mean." He gave her a rather whimsical smile, pleased to know himself included in her causes of happiness. "Intellect _per se_ is something you either have or you haven't - and you have - and knowledge mostly happens with experience. Just cramming in facts to pass exams is mainly just good for passing exams. Outwith the exam itself you don't need to know all of the one hundred and seventeen uses of Viper's Bugloss off by heart - just know that they exist, and where to look them up. Even in Potions - the main thing you need to remember is the anomalies, the things that aren't always in the books - the unexpected interaction which turns an infusion into an explosion. Everything else will come with practice - so long as you remember the things that might prevent you from living long enough to get any. Practice, I mean.

"And besides - silly girl, I have so much in you to be proud of - if I have any right to be proud of achievements which belong to you and not to me - and if raw intellect were all I was interested in I could have had Albus for the asking years ago." There was a pause while they both thought about that one, and then shuddered in unison. "And your parents are going to have something else to think about - if we're going to go public about our, er, _relationship_ before NEWTs."

"All the more reason to do well on my NEWTs." Hermione sighed, and then kissed his own knuckles lightly in return before disengaging her hands and starting to stack her colour-coded piles into one big one. "I don't want them thinking you've been interrupting my studying or anything. It's bad enough that they know Harry and Ron do it, but I want them to like you as much as possible." She paused, and smiled at him over a handful of pale-orange parchment. "And I _am_ happy, when I'm not thinking about exams. There's so much to look forward to _after_ Hogwarts, now."

Severus smiled back. "Remarkably, there is. I always used to dread the beginning of the new school year - it was Monday morning raised to the power of ten - but now, whether I teach or not, and whether the new intake are the usual bunch of unmitigated drooling halfwits or not, I'll have the fascination of watching your career unfold, and the pleasure of your company. The others', too, of course, but yours most of all."

"If I survive the NEWTs. If my heart doesn't just stop or something." Hermione sighed again, smoothing the timetable out as best she could. "But... yes. I'm looking forward to that, too. To being able to just... be together, and not worry about exams or people finding out or anything. And go on that holiday." She smiled at him. "We have a date with a rowing boat, don't we?"

"A nice, quiet, summery backwater, where we can drowse and drift...." His own answering smile slipped a little. "With Parkinson and Bulstrode and a legion of attack-hippogriffs hiding behind every bush and watching every blasted kiss, until such time as we manage to put a lid on Riddle and all his works, but it can't be helped. Perhaps we could Obliviate them of the juicier bits. Or cast Disillusionment on each other and then do it by feel: that might be amusing."

"We could always borrow Harry's Cloak: after all the guards are supposed to be watching to see if anyone approaches you, not what _you_ do. You could leave a foot or something sticking out, to show you were still there. And it's quite nice, under there... it casts this sort of almost-shadow which could be rather romantic if I wasn't always under there with Harry and Ron." She turned her face up to him and he bent and kissed her solemnly on the nose. She gave a strand of his hair a gentle tweak. "I do like the idea of you dozing with your head on my lap again... and maybe we could read something that _isn't_ a textbook, together."

"I rather like the idea of re-reading _The Last Unicorn_, now that I am in something approximating to my right mind - I'm sure I missed a lot of it before, and it seemed quite romantic, in rather a sad way. Or we could read Donne, and put some of his racier suggestions into practice: you already have a head-start on the 'hairy diadem'." He grinned at her half-playful, half-serious pout, and lay back down against the pillows. "But getting romantic under James Potter's invisibility cloak, that he used to stalk me and get me on my own at school - Merlin, I don't know if that's poetic justice or just creepy." He frowned. "It must be a remarkably good one, to still work so well after all those years - but I suppose he always was a swanky rich bastard."

"It's just the same as it's always been... smaller, of course. We used to be able to get all three of us under it easily. But it should do for two of us, if we're sitting down." Hermione smiled at him. "And I like the sound of both of those. It's nice to have something specific to look forward to... and if He hasn't been stopped, by then, we'll just have to do it again when he has been. I could certainly bear more than one spell of drifting about with you on a river."

"Perhaps in the summer, when I don't have to be at beck-and-call for the acne-infested hordes of Slytherin, we could take a house somewhere near a river - in Bath, perhaps, or the Derwent Valley. Then we could hire a boat whenever we wanted."

"That sounds wonderful. Perhaps I'll survive NEWTs after all, with that to look forward to." Hermione allowed herself to flop sideways on the bed, resting her head on the pillow. "Perhaps if I just don't bother _sleeping_ until then. Would it bother you terribly if I used a wandlight to read by when I'm here with you?"

Severus tried to appear stern and teacherly, although it was difficult to manage when her nose was only inches from his, and he was afraid that he merely looked cross-eyed. "It won't bother me from the point of view of keeping me awake, but it will bother me _very much_ if I think that you aren't sleeping. Staying up late to cram on the night before an exam is one thing: but if you skimp on sleep for more than a week your performance will start to decline, and your health with it."

"Sleep is for people who don't have exams." Hermione grinned at him. "Oh, all right. I'll sleep. But only because it makes my knees go all wobbly when you smoulder at me like that."

"Good girl." All that talk about drowsing in a boat had made his own eyelids feel like lead, but he made the effort to prop himself up on his elbow (the false one, he had to admit he was certainly getting better at wearing the thing for long periods) and gaze down at her, half amused and half serious. "You need to take a break from studying sometimes or your brain will overboil, like milk, and I have just the thing. You need to stay in practice with your combat training - one never knows when you might need it, especially given your predilection for wading in to assist some stray or other - and Millie Bulstrode is in need of a sparring partner. I promised her I'd ask you if you were up for a rematch."

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When Albus attempted to be stern with Minerva about her concealing the news of Severus's romance, she laughed, tapped him on the chest with a rolled-up copy of the _Prophet_ and said "It's not my fault if you're slow on the uptake, Dumbledore: you could have worked it out for yourself if you weren't beating for the other side."

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"That was... considerably better, Potter." He had actually sensed the point of his attention sliding, and yet had been unable to prevent it, ending up watching an anodyne memory of a lesson at the boy's primary school, and a house martin flying repeatedly past the classroom window to a nest just out of sight, carrying tufts of horsehair the boy knew it had stolen from an armchair by an open window in the staff room. A vivid, memorable vignette, and completely uninformative, even as to the boy's character, except perhaps that he was easily distracted from study.

Potter pushed a flop of untidy hair back off his forehead. "I thought, you know, if I just shoved you out - I mean, not you-you, but somebody who was really trying to get into my head when I didn't want them to - that would look suspicious: it would let them know I was hiding something. So I thought about something that was real, but didn't connect to anything much."

"I'm glad to see you're finally beginning to get the idea." In truth, he was highly impressed, and also relieved: too-deep contact with Potter's mind made him uneasy, and he was glad to have been headed off from achieving it. He no longer had to fear to meet blazing scorn and hatred in Lily's grass-green eyes: instead, the awareness that the boy had an open link to Voldemort made the hairs on the back of his neck bristle, and he feared to brush against the outskirts of the same dark mind which had bound him in deathless, ceaseless agony and sent him back to Hogwarts as a mocking gift, a little over six months ago.

"Yeah, well," Harry muttered; "now that you're teaching Hermione as well, I can get her to explain -"

"You really should not be distracting H- Miss Granger with extra work that you could do for yourself."

"I just - understand things better if they're filtered through Hermione, OK?"

Severus tcch-ed irritably. "At least it should be a weight off her mind to know that you are that much closer to being able to prevent the Dark Lord from gaining access to your mind."

"Oh," Potter said with studied casualness; "breaking the contact wasn't what I had in mind."

Severus stiffened in alarm. "What do you - ?!"

Potter grinned at him like a very smug, be-spectacled young wolf. "I was planning to feed him false information: seeing that you can't do it any more."

"That's !!!... not a bad idea, actually...."

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"I think it's a very good idea, you writing a paper about yourself," Luna said dreamily, folding back the covers for him to climb into bed, and then perching on the edge of the mattress next to him. "It makes sure that your thinking self is in command of the bits of you that were damaged, and that means you can fix yourself better quite well really."

"Erm - I wouldn't have put it quite like that, but essentially I believe you are correct." He gave her a quizzical look. "You're not going to attribute my... _condition_ to some sort of supermagical entity?"

"Oh no, of course not." She smiled brightly. "Not in this room, or this bed. You should watch out for soul-leeches when you go out, but in here nothing like that can come near you past _that_" - she pointed at the ceiling, at the strands strung with driftwood and shell and delicate metal rods and shards of coloured glass, revolving and chiming faintly in the breeze from the loch - "and the beads I charmed for you." She drew them up gently from where they hung at the back of the headboard, and showed them to him, gleaming a deep rich cobalt blue in the lamplight. "I put everything I knew that would help into them, and I know quite a lot really."

"And some of it is even true" he replied, covering his embarrassment, and then winced: the last thing he wanted to do was offend or hurt her, but she only smiled back at him gravely and let the beads rattle back into shadow.

"More than you might think."

There came a light, familiar rapping at the door, and the amicable murmur of voices. Whoever was outside was acceptable to his faithful Slytherins: and he recognised the knock. "Come in!" he called happily, and Hermione slipped into the room with a warm, approving look for Luna, who smiled serenely in response and got up.

"I'll leave you two alone to be romantic," Luna said cheerfully, and wandered out.

"That was... quite tactful for Luna, actually," Hermione observed wryly, going over to sit on the edge of the bed and kiss him hello. "How are you?"

"It was, wasn't it? She can be alarmingly observant and incisive under all that flimflam, and terrifyingly blunt - I feel we got off lightly. And - I'm nervous, frankly. It's three days to Beltane, and I'm worried that you - that you might feel pressurized by my suggesting an actual date. There's still plenty of time for you to change your mind if you - if you're not sure. I mean - you can change your mind at any point, you know you can, but I know once we actually, um, started you'd insist on going ahead in order not to be seen to fail at something. But it - I want you to know it wouldn't be a failure on your part if you were to decide against it."

"Far from it... uhm, I'm actually looking forward to it quite a lot. If you wanted to put it off, I'd understand, but believe me I have no intention of doing so." She went a bit pink. "And I... er... have something for you. I wasn't going to show you, because it's really a bit... uhm... sentimental, and was certainly rather premature on my part, but I would like you to have it, since you seem to need reminding often how much I care for you...."

"_Was_ premature?"

"Er... yes." Now almost entirely incoherent with nerves, she rummaged in her pocket. "It's... well, it was Valentine's Day, and you were still... but I sort of hoped we were going.... where we are, and I... uhm...." Fiery red and speechless with embarrassment, she offered him a small card, red with a gracefully-proportioned heart outlined in silver.

A small frown creased his brows and he gave her an odd look, but he took it from her gently, cupping it in the still-awkward, prosthetic hand so that he could open it with the other. As he did so, a carefully-pressed, preserved pansy slipped out and fell into his lap.

Inside, the same silver pen had written:

"For love's sake I speak not of love,  
pour out my words by my silent pen,  
I care too much to do you harm,  
by speaking too soon - hoping when  
you were not so sorely hurt,  
that you would turn to me again,  
and by this valentine might know,  
that I loved you even then."

It was not deathless verse, exactly, but the obvious sincerity of the sentiment made him feel a little light-headed, and even more than by the words he was touched by the fact that she, unlike Potter, knew the Language of Flowers very well and had given him the symbol of the thing he had needed so very much at that time - and if he needed it less now, that was partly because she herself had given it to him. He picked up the flower, very gently, and looked at it - too overcome with sudden emotion to meet her eyes. "Heart's Ease," he said softly.

"You needed it so badly," Hermione replied equally softly. "And I wasn't sure I could give it to you, but I wanted to so much. And I knew it was far too soon for anything like that, so I made the Valentine and then hid it. I thought I could give it to you sometime when you were better, if things worked out. And now seemed like a good time, although I was almost too embarrassed to show it to you." She fiddled with the wide sleeve of her robe. "It just... it's very sentimental, I know, but that's what Valentine's Day is for."

"You _did_ ease my heart, you and - and all the others, of course, but you most of all. Just the idea that somebody so - unsullied could still find me attractive was.... And it's not - sentimental. Not really. All right, the silver heart is maybe a little... but the words, you were writing about a genuine sentiment, a genuine kindness, not just - indulging in emotion out of a love of self-dramatization, which is what I understand sentimentality to be. You _meant_ this - you've proved to me that you did." He forced himself to meet her eyes. "Thank you. You do ease my heart - every day. You ease it more than you know."

"I did mean it." She reached out tentatively to take his hand, careful not to squash the pansy as she did so. "And... well. Since you're as prone to self-doubt and fretting as I am, I thought... it might help, to have something you can take out and look at to remind yourself that I really do love you. In the last few days I think I've put every protective spell I've ever learned on that sonnet you gave me. I could probably drop most of Hogwarts on it and then set the pile on fire, and it would survive." She blushed a bit, and smiled at him. "This has, completely incidentally, given me a chance to take it back out and reread it about a dozen times. I've been a bit worried about Beltane too... that you'd change your mind, I mean, or decide that you'd made some sort of dreadful mistake...."

"I do worry about it," he said, frowning. "I worry that _you_ are making a dreadful mistake, or that I'm going to do something stupid and ruin it for you - or get so nervous that I can't do it at all. Sometimes I think that as the older one here, as someone who is at least nominally in authority, I ought to be sensible on your behalf and decide, firmly, that you should look for somebody more suitable - but, selfish bastard that I am, I couldn't bear to, because I want you desperately, and the idea of making love to you makes me feel like a silly, hopeful teenager again. No offence meant."

"None taken." She poked him very gently in the stomach with a fingertip. "But you're being very silly. It's such a basically flawed concept - the whole 'No, no, you must find someone more worthy of you' thing, I mean. What girl, I ask you, who is in love with someone who comes out with that particular line of melodramatic tripe - don't look at me like that, it IS tripe - is actually going to say 'Oh, well, all right, if you put it that way' and start auditioning other men for the role of One True Love? Honestly?" She shook her head. "It sounds very nice in the dramatic epics, I'll concede, but it's hopelessly impractical. No, I'm afraid you're just going to have to get used to the idea of me being madly in love with you, because I'm not changing my mind. And as for ruining it for me... you won't. I know it's going to be awkward and a bit uncomfortable at first, for both of us - my youth and virgin state would guarantee that even without your recent history. But I'll be with you. That is, honestly, all that matters to me."

Severus placed the pressed flower back into the card and laid them both very carefully on the bedside table, well away from the water-jug, before turning back to her with a sudden smile. "You do make me feel young, and silly, and hopeful, do you know that? I would say 'You make me feel young again,' but I never did feel particularly young, when I was. And I know that by wizarding standards I hardly count as much older than you anyway, but the Muggle part of me still thinks that thirty-eight is nearly ancient, and yet here you are giving me the chance to do - first-night nerves, and Valentines, and writing love-poetry for a pretty girl, and kissing behind the teachers' backs - all the things I should have done when I was your age and never really had the chance at. I wanted Lily - wanted her desperately - but I never had the courage to tell her so: and she, well, she saw me as a brother." One she could bully and lead around on a string, he admitted in the privacy of his own heart, but it was still love, of a kind, and for a long time the only love he had ever had. "So there was never any actual romance, there, just - pointless yearning.

"Not that - well, I don't want to make myself sound _too_ pathetic, I did get the occasional kiss, but only from the sort of girl who'd kiss anything with a pulse! It was decidedly unromantic - but nobody would have wanted to get romantic with the, the school outcast, and in any case Lucius had left me feeling so... grubby that I didn't expect anyone to anyway.

"But this is like - something in a dream. By the time you achieve the vast age of thirty-eight yourself, you will have heard many people looking back at their schooldays, at their first fumbling romances, and saying 'If only I'd known then what I know now' but I _do_ know now, and you're giving me the chance to live my late teens over again without making the total arse of myself that I would undoubtedly have made when I really was eighteen. With any luck."

Hermione blushed happily. "I... thank you," she said, leaning over to kiss him softly. "I never had a chance to do a lot of those things either, not really, and I'm really enjoying doing them with you. It... actually, I don't mind not having a chance before, now. You were definitely worth waiting for." She paused, and grinned suddenly. "Although I think I might have felt a bit more confident if you were in your late teens," she admitted. "It's fairly easy to render teenage boys incoherent, which boosts a girl's confidence. You're more of a challenge as an adult... which I like, even if it's a bit nerve-wracking sometimes."

"I may be - and I trust that I am - more coherent than I was when I was your age, but I suspect I am easier to handle now than I was then. When I was eighteen I thought that scowling ferociously at everybody and communicating in grunts would make me seem mysterious and sophisticated - although in retrospect it probably just made me look constipated."

"Oh, dear, I am far gone," Hermione said with some amusement. "As annoying as I know I'd find that if someone else did it, imagining YOU as a teenager being all grumpy and uncommunicative in an attempt to seem sophisticated seems terribly sweet. I simply would have had to coax conversation out of you, possibly by the application of feminine guile and a parchment full of Arithmantic formulae waved under your nose."

"That would probably have done it," he agreed gravely, "but then I would have been infuriatingly smug and quelling and all-knowing. And you would have been equally opinionated, and then we would have had a fight. About Arithmancy, which would just confirm everyone else's opinion that we were a pair of hopeless geeks."

"And which might have resulted in me being overcome with passion and dragging you into a lip-lock right there," she teased. "You know how stimulating I find your intellect. Arithmancy, an intellectual argument, you smouldering all over the place while being utterly infuriating... my self-control could easily have been overcome."

"And I would have thought I'd died and gone to heaven, and turned into a stammering puddle of hormones. And then tried to retrieve my dignity by pretending to be some sort of budget Don Juan. Having the most terrifyingly intelligent girl in the school hanging on my arm would certainly have improved my social standing no end!"

"And finding a boyfriend of any description would have done the same for mine," she said fondly. "I'm sure you would have been utterly adorable, too, all bewildered as to why I fancied you and having to be kissed at great length at regular intervals to keep you convinced. Which would have been a dreadful struggle on my part, obviously, but my love is entirely selfless."

"Oh, entirely," he agreed. "You wouldn't have enjoyed it at all when I kissed you back like this...."

Afterwards, he sighed and leaned his head back against the headboard with its burden of beads. "It's a measure of how much good you've already done for my ego that I can joke about it. At the time, I really _would_ have been absolutely certain, underneath the bluster, that you were only being kind, and that you couldn't possibly really enjoy being kissed by an ugly, dirty thing like me."

He turned his head and looked at her, troubled and serious. "If you'd managed to convince me, then I wouldn't have been so - so _angry_ all the time. So bitter. I probably wouldn't have been so desperate for protection, for acceptance, for revenge as to join the bloody Death Eaters in the first place. None of - this would have happened. Whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing - that depends on how important you think my - contribution to the war effort has been. Albus insists that it has been paramount, but I am not convinced: I think he just says that to make me feel better. But - "

He turned away sharply and looked down, so that his hair hung about his face in the old, neurotic gesture. "It was me, Hermione," he said hoarsely. "I was the one who betrayed Harry's parents. I didn't know what I was doing - I overheard a snatch of a prophecy and I relayed it to my master, without knowing whom it referred to or how He would interpret it, and when I found out I was horrified. Lily - my Lils, my friend whom I had driven away by my own crass stupidity - and a man I owed my life to, however much I hated him; a child - it was mainly that that brought me back to Dumbledore's side, to try to put things right and save them, but thanks to Peter fucking Pettigrew I was too late anyway. But it was that - it was the abortive attempt to kill Harry which brought my - master down. If I hadn't - if I hadn't been so _stupid_, so venal, if I hadn't joined Him in the first place, if I had never conveyed the prophecy to Him, would we all now be living under the iron heel? Albus certainly thinks so - or claims to."

Hermione blinked, then pulled him into a tight hug, drawing his head down onto her shoulder and pressing her lips against his hair. "Oh, my love..." she whispered, her eyes filling. It was horrible, yes, but he must not think that anything would ever drive her away, and she wouldn't flinch even for an instant. "How horrible for you... to realize what had happened, to know it was your fault even though it was an accident...." She rocked him a little bit, kissing the top of his head again. "But you can't beat yourself up over what might have happened, we don't _know_ what might have happened...."

"According to Albus I should congratulate myself, because Lily's sacrifice resulted in the so-called bloody Dark Lord being knocked off his perch for thirteen years, and enabled the weapon which Harry is. Supposedly. But I find it hard to see her death in that light." He made a choked, unhappy noise that was close to a sob. "I begged Him for her life, did you know that? - and He granted it to me. He would have spared her, if she'd stepped aside and let Him have the brat, but she wouldn't do it, and the fact that her sacrifice was voluntary, that He and I gave her a choice, was what gave her death so much fucking _power_. But it didn't make her loss any easier to bear, especially knowing that I - that it was my fault. I never knew whether she knew that it was I that gave her away, but if she did she must have thought that I - that I wanted the Mudblood killed."

"Shhh.... She can't have known, I'm sure of it. Sirius said he'd never even heard a rumour that you were a Death Eater, and if Lily had known that you were... were a member, surely she would have told Sirius?" She held him tight and rocked him comfortingly. "And of course you shouldn't congratulate yourself, what an insensitive thing to say! But you didn't know what was going to happen, and you did try to protect her, so you shouldn't blame yourself too much, either. A little, for the initial poor judgement, but what other people do isn't your fault." She rested her cheek against the top of his head, making little soothing noises. "And I, personally, have always had my doubts about that prophecy. It sounds to me like the self-fulfilling kind... if V-Voldemort hadn't found out, it probably wouldn't have come out at all. And then someone else might have _tried_ to kill him, instead of all standing around with hopeful expressions waiting for a seventeen-year-old to pull out a miracle, as if he were King Arthur and Voldemort were a stone with a sword sticking out!"

"To be fair, Albus didn't actually use the word 'congratulate' - but that was the gist of it." He sighed and curled up against her, grateful for her easy closeness, her unreserved kindness, and yet still mortally embarrassed about finding it comforting. "And - He - it's best not to say the name, Hermione, it really is - _He_ can't be killed. Not - not in the normal sense. You're right, it's a bloody farce, everyone standing around waiting for this - rather ordinary, excessively fallible teenage boy to Fulfil His Destiny - but there isn't a simple way of killing - Him. If there were, I would have knifed the bastard at the earliest opportunity, believe me. But He has to be killed seven times before it will stick, and six of them have to be done using special magic, and if He notices then you go back to Square One like a particularly horrible game of Snakes and Ladders."

"He _can_ be killed, albeit not easily. Even if it's only temporarily, the way Harry did it the first time - destroy his body and he loses a large portion of his power, until he manages to get himself put together again. It might not be permanent, but it's better than having him walking around, isn't it?" Hermione had given this subject a lot of thought, and was pleased to finally have a chance to discuss it. "And then, of course, _all_ of his power is magical. If we could find a way to neutralize his magical abilities... say a spell that cancels out magic within a certain radius, or a potion or poison that cuts you off from your magic - seriously, there must be SOMETHING like that around, surely there have been wizards who needed neutralizing before - then he could be contained or temporarily destroyed much more easily.

"And then there's the Horcruces. What I know about them I've gotten from Harry, so I'm not sure how accurate it is, but from what I understand he split his soul into seven pieces, six of which got hidden away and one of which is him, so to speak, and that bit has to stay in his body, or roaming around loose or whatever, is that how it works?"

"Roughly. The problem with driving His... core self out of the body is that then we know He's alive but we don't know where He is, and even if we then destroy the Horcruxes, He could just make more, and we wouldn't be able to stop Him because we wouldn't be able to trace Him. In a few years, we would be right back where we started. Albus and I have been over and over this and we really do need to find and destroy the Horcruxes before we go after His body - and He mustn't feel us doing it, because if He does He can just make more.

"And Horcruxes are old, deep magic. Even if we neutralized His magic the Horcruxes would still prevent Him from being killed, so we would simply - drive Him underground where we couldn't see Him. The Horcruxes really do have to go first."

"But he can't keep making more forever," Hermione pointed out, frowning. "I mean, he's already showing physical signs of what Harry says Professor Dumbledore called being 'maimed and incomplete'. How many more pieces can he break it into before he degenerates too far to even use magic properly? You can't do wizard magic without your soul, according to Jorgensen's _The Lesser Magics of the Undead_, although I'm not sure if he's a completely reliable source, because Hickleworthy's _Dead But Not Gone_ contradicts him on the subject of the social and dietary habits of ghouls...."

"On the whole, I would regard Jorgensen as the more reliable source." He coughed gently and pushed himself upright to sit next to Hermione, having started to feel slightly ridiculous curled up like a cat in her lap while discussing military strategy.

"Part of the problem, you see, is that so little is known about Horcruxes - it's such Dark and such obscure magic - that we don't know for sure whether, when a Horcrux is destroyed... well, we don't know whether the soul-fragment it contained is destroyed with it, or whether it just flows back into the core soul - in which case, He could just split it off again and make another. We do know, or think we know, that He can't tell when a Horcrux is destroyed but He might just be too - spiritually insensitive to tell what is going on with His own soul. Albus thinks that this is because years of murder have progressively fractured and coarsened His soul, the more so with each fresh killing - _I_ think it's because He's a sodding psychopath who is going progressively gaga."

"A sound assessment." He had pulled away with his "I feel silly" face on. Hermione was having none of that, and snuggled up to him to put her head on his shoulder instead. "The gaga part, I mean. Anyway, as I understand it, the part of him that's... him... has to remain free for the Horcruces to be any good, because they're all quiescent and bound to objects. Do you know what would happen if the part of his soul that's still in use was also bound to an object? That can be done, according to Fitzwilliam-Wickley's _Arcanum Atrox_...."

Soul-binding was decidedly Dark Magic. The _Arcanum Atrox_ was in the Restricted Section, for damned good reason. She sincerely hoped she wasn't going to get into too much trouble for this.

Severus, who had been patting her arm absent-mindedly, paused. "And what a busy little bee we've been" his dry voice said softly. "There are _reasons_ why access to certain books is - supposedly! - restricted to experienced adepts. There are some spells where the thought is the deed - where simply reading a bloody spell is enough to activate it, unless you know precisely what you are doing. There are some spells which read you _back_. But yes - binding his core soul to an object, if it could be done, ought to mean that as the Horcruxes were used up the soul-fragments would flow into the control-object, rather than into His mortal body, and destroying the object would then kill Him. And if Jorgensen is right, He wouldn't be able to do magic to defend himself, if none of His soul was in his body." He tapped his fingers thoughtfully against Hermione's arm. "Of course, He could still defend himself by non-magical means - but I doubt it would occur to him."

"Would he even still be moving around?" Hermione asked doubtfully. "Mightn't it put him in a coma or something? Of course, if he was still awake, he'd still have his Death Eaters and things.... or possibly not," she added thoughtfully. "I mean, when the boss gets stripped of all his magical power, that's about the time an ambitious underling starts getting ideas, right? Either way, I think if we could get the remains of his soul away from him, he'd probably be a lot less dangerous while we looked for the other Horcruces."

"Whether He remained functional or not.... As I understand it it would depend on whether His soul was still in communication with his mind. Victims who have been soul-sucked by Dementors...." He hesitated, shuddering at the memory. "They are left - empty, capable of understanding only the simplest direct commands, and that only if they already knew them before.... But the traditional idea of binding the soul to an object was usually to leave the person functional but immune to certain types of magical attack, so long as the attacker didn't know where the soul was stored. In that case, the soul is still - Well, whatever the Dementors do, whether they truly destroy the soul or simply sever it from the body, they certainly remove it from life. A bound soul, on the other hand, is definitely still alive and present, and would normally still be linked to its associated _persona_, unless definite steps were taken to isolate it.

"But yes: if - He - were to lose His ability to perform magic, I can think of at least eight members of the inner circle - which is to say, nearly all of them! - who would immediately decide that the time was ripe for a change of leadership."

"Maybe we should consider that, then," Hermione said hopefully, snuggling up closer. "It might even be useful... if we bound him into a mirror, for example. I read in _Muggle Fairy Tales and Their Magical Origins_ that you can do that. Except it's definitely Dark Magic, and I think we'd need to have his body on the spot for that. But if we could work out how to do it, we could make the mirror show us where the other Horcruces are. And even if we can't get his soul out, or kill him... surely we could do something to distract him. Poison him, maybe, but with something subtle...." She paused. "Or something obvious. He's a wizard, and at least in his seventies... do you think he even knows what lead poisoning does to people? It would take a long time to kill him, even if we could get enough into him, but if he was delusional and having hallucinations and seizures, that would _certainly_ distract him from ordering more attacks... and he wouldn't be able to detect it by checking for charms or hexes...."

"Hmm - but how would you deliver the poison? And remember, for a wizard, even a half-blood, seventy is not that old. He was at Hogwarts a few years ahead of Minerva - two years above Hagrid - which means he's a little over seventy, and Minerva isn't even going grey yet: she assures me that isn't dye. But I do like the idea of binding his soul, or part of it, into a mirror and then getting it to speak... I wonder if it could be done through Potter? Since he seems to have some sort of mental link."

"Maybe... and unlike you and the other teachers, I _can_ usually get Harry to do something without explaining it to him in detail first." Hermione grinned suddenly. "So Himself wouldn't be able to tell what he was doing, because Harry knows I always explain things to him eventually so he doesn't insist on it right away." She touched his temple lightly. "And does that mean you're not going to be going grey for another forty years or so either? Because you'd look quite distinguished if you did.... still, I suppose it'll give me time to catch up."

"I've found a few grey hairs since - since last year, which is only to be expected, but I spelled them black again. But if you think they would look - distinguished.... But I don't like the idea of you 'catching up,' Hermione, I really don't. That would imply that you would age faster than me. But I'm three-quarters Muggle myself, and besides, as far as we've been able to ascertain it's mainly possession of wizarding powers which conveys longevity, not having wizard ancestry. Pure-bloods with no Squibs in their family, and half-bloods like Albus with a Muggle-born rather than a Muggle parent, do tend to live longest, which suggests a genetic aspect, that having inherited wizardry from both parents conveys more protection than getting it from only one or having it arise spontaneously: but the main difference is between wizard and non-wizard. You and I both have a good chance of living to comfortably over a hundred, if nothing kills us first."

"Well, narrowing the gap, then. When I'm a hundred, it'll be hardly worth noticing." She smiled, touching his temple again. "And I do think it would look distinguished... especially tied back, with a few discreet silver threads lighting up in the black... and I'll probably catch up on that, at least, since everyone in my family goes completely grey by fifty." She kissed his forehead. "And I hope we do have at least another sixty years. Or eighty. Eighty would be better. Do you think you could put up with my chatter for eighty years?"

"Provided you promise to go away and read a book or similar when I'm actually working on an academic paper - and assuming you can put up with my horrible temper for eighty years, of course. Could you, do you think?"

"I definitely think I could... and I'll go off and read a book while you're working if you'll do the same when I'm working. Unless we decide to work together... which I think I would enjoy quite a lot. Although I might have some problems with getting distracted at first." She grinned impishly. "You can be very... stimulating... when you're caught up in something that interests you."

Severus smiled back at her. "You must be right - whatever I did as a Death Eater, I must have expiated my sins - or why else would Fate send me such a perfect gift: an attractive girl who is turned on by geeks? Do you realize what a prize that makes you?"

"On the basis of the evidence until now, not much of one. But if you think I'm a prize, then I honestly don't care anymore what anyone else thinks." She smiled a bit wistfully. "Although if I'd known it was going to be this easy to convince you that I'm worthy of you, I wouldn't have been so nervous about it!"

"You are a pearl without price; a woman of fortitude, whose price is above rubies. Really. Do you have any idea how... flattering it is, to a, a sour, ill-tempered man with little status and less looks, even aside from my... injuries, to have the brightest witch of her generation think that _she_ might not be good enough for _him_?"

"Do you have any idea how flattering it is to have one of the bravest, strongest, most brilliant... and very attractive, whether he believes it or not... men of our time think of me as a prize?" she countered seriously. "I couldn't _give_ myself away to most boys my age, and if I were lucky most of the older men would be kind enough not to laugh at me. But you... I would have thought myself lucky if you'd only laughed. And you didn't, you actually think you're lucky to have someone who's a... a fallback, someone people notice is a girl only when every other available female has turned them down."

"You're going to have a long job to convince me that I might be - attractive, Hermione, when even my own family.... It's one of the things Severus means. It means the harsh one, the cut-off one, the plain one - really I think in the sense of 'unadorned,' but my Dads chose to interpret it as 'ugly', and he never let me forget it. As for you...."

He looked back at her, as serious as she was. "You must realize that Potter and Weasley don't see you as a girl in that... dateable sense because they've known you too well for too long: they see you as a sister. Especially since you do mother them, so that makes you their big sister, which is even more intimidating and asexual. And - I'm going to let you into a closely-guarded secret. Most boys of your own age - straight boys, that is - are _terrified_ of girls. They'll go with the likes of Lavender Brown or Pansy Parkinson because a girl who flirts openly has already done half the work for them, but to approach somebody who seems unapproachable... much safer to pretend they don't care, in order not to be rejected, which they are sure in their heart of hearts that they will be.

"It's only boys with that extra bit of confidence, or that extra lack of brain.... You'll notice that Viktor Krum didn't have any qualms about asking you out because even though he's nearly as plain as I am, poor boy, he's famous and also rather older than you, so he felt more confident about it. Bastard-McLaggen felt confident about it because he's a brainless Quidditch-jock who thinks the whole world should fall down and worship him anyway... which, now I come to think about it, was probably how James bloody Potter got the girl. It wasn't just me who fancied Lily - half the school lusted after her from afar - but only Potter had the brass neck actually to say so, and she probably thought he was the only one who wanted her, and the best she could hope for.

"And you do know all this, you know, when you aren't - worn out from too much studying for NEWTs, and wound-up with nerves about - about Beltane. You were the one who told me that you could have Potter or Weasley for the asking, if you actually made a move on them, but for some unaccountable reason you preferred me. You're nearly as insecure about your own attractiveness as I am - but in three days' time, I'm going to have the chance to really _prove_ to you how attractive I find you."

"That was... bluff, at least in part. There've been times when I could have had either, but... well. I actually asked Ron out, did you know that? In an awkward, mostly as friends sort of way, but I asked him if he wanted to go to Professor Slughorn's Christmas party with me. Not long after that, I walked into the common-room to find him sucking face with Lavender. And I do mean sucking, I don't think either of them are very good at it." She smiled ruefully. "I could probably have him now that she's run her course, but I don't really want him anymore. Even if I didn't have you, I'm not sure my pride could stand coming second to Lavender Brown... not to mention the fact that while the mothering has definitely put Harry and Neville off the idea of me being a girl, Ron seems to like the idea of being fussed over and looked after forever. As I told you once, I believe, I'm not too keen on that particular idea.

"As for you... I'll keep telling you until you believe it. Entirely aside from my fascination with your mind and your heart... both of which are wonderful... you can make my heart pound just by looking at me, and it may be a bit raspier now, but that purr can still make me feel decidedly wobbly in the knee regions. When you smile at me I have to fight the urge to blush and giggle like a twelve-year-old with a crush, and when you hold me, I feel warm and safe and blissfully happy. And in three days, I'm looking forward to proving that to you as well." She paused, and touched her fingertip gently to the tip of his nose. "And I love your nose," she added fondly. "It's so noble and Roman. Julius Caesar's is nothing in comparison."

"It certainly carries all before it - and enters the room substantially in advance of the rest of me. And I'm very glad you _don't_ want him any more; I don't want to come second-best either, and whatever doubts I may have about my own appearance, personality and temperament, I'm prepared to concede that I am at least a much better kisser than Ronald Weasley - which I shall presently prove to you," he added, doing so.

"You could never come second to anyone," she told him, returning the kiss happily. "Not to me. You've ruined me for other men, you know... you're heroic, attractive, you appreciate me for both body _and_ mind, and you can spell 'polytheistic'. And you know what it means. I could never go back to lesser men now."

Severus chuckled deep in his throat. "I can spell much harder words than that - if it will encourage you to kiss me."

She grinned at him, and leaned in to kiss him long and lingeringly. "As if I needed any encouragement to do that...."

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And later, later as he drowsed in his bed beside her under a light cover, he could feel the smooth scoop of his own flank and the sharp jut of a hipbone, the flex of a broad, flat wrist and the soft pulling weight of his own genitals as the mattress shaped itself comfortably under him, a light breeze from the window brushing the hairs on his forearm and tracing the contours of the hard, scarred face he no long had to be ashamed of, because somebody by some miracle had found it attractive; and it no longer seemed such a terrible thing to be trapped in this body, even as maimed as it was.

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**Author's note:**

In PoA, Remus says, 'I watched you cross the grounds and enter Hagrid's hut. Twenty minutes later, you left Hagrid, and set off back towards the castle. But you were now accompanied by somebody else. [cut] I couldn't believe my eyes, [cut] I thought the map must be malfunctioning. How could he be with you?' When the Trio arrived at Hagrid's hut there was nobody inside it except Hagrid, Peter Pettigrew, and Fang and Buckbeak who may or may not show up on the Map. You would think that Remus, watching them _via_ the Map, would at once spot Peter's name in Hagrid's house - but he doesn't see Peter until he leaves with Ron. _Ergo_, for whatever reason, the Map can't see inside Hagrid's house.

A sonic screwdriver is a multi-purpose instrument used by the eponymous Doctor in several story-arcs of the notoriously scary British _Dr Who_ science fiction TV series. It was used by the Doctor from 1968 to 1982, so if young Severus had the chance to see the series at all, he would have seen the sonic screwdriver.

"Batting for the other side" is a traditional British euphemism for homosexuality, but since Minerva is a witch she uses a Quidditch rather than a cricket metaphor.

The rather racy sixteenth century English metaphysical poet John Donne described his lover's hair (on her head!) as a "hairy diadem", contrasting it with the wired headdress which she was removing as she undressed.

Barring computer-outages the Beltane chapter should actually be ready to post on Beltane (and right after that, I'll have to update my **Ffn How-To** page to take account of the latest update). Watch this space....


	26. 23 M'aidez

**Disclaimer:** I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

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**23: M'AIDEZ**

He broke away from the kiss at last, shivering and breathing hard. "You're quite sure - absolutely sure you want to go ahead?"

"Yes." Hermione put her hand up and touched his cheek, opening her mind to him and willing him to see that her own shivering was due to anticipation and sheer desire rather than to fear. Allowing for a touch of first-night nerves, of course. "Completely sure." She embraced him and drew him into another kiss and they rolled over together, until she was pinned down under the warm weight of him, and his dark hair hung down in curtains around her face.

Severus lay over her, pressing her down into the mattress even as his mouth pressed down over hers, feeling the smooth skin of her belly against his own scarred stomach and her hot tongue sliding against his. He tried to take some of his weight off her, but it was difficult to do so one-handed, and he wondered distractedly if it had been a mistake to attempt to manage without the prostheses, unaesthetic though they were.

He hoped it hadn't been a mistake to allow the stone snakes around the hearth to slither back into his life, either: but he had felt that allowing them to be present for this momentous step would be some sort of apology for having banished them for so long. And they were not - he knew that they were not - Nagini, who functioned as an extension of Tom Riddle's will: they were a fragment of the castle which cradled him, given individual life. Something like life, anyway.

Crippled as he was, with only the one knee, he could lift his pelvis off Hermione for a moment but he was too unstable to keep it there for long. Unable to rise up and support himself on his knees as a whole man could have done, he had little choice about pushing his hips against hers with every movement and the tight hot pulse of his own desire made him dizzy. His nerve-endings felt super-charged everywhere his skin touched hers and with almost the whole of himself he wanted to give way and fall, to be welcomed and accepted by her, to express his love physically by sinking into her like an otter sliding down into the encompassing river - and it was only a small, treacherous shard of pain which insisted that he was about to do something murderously dreadful to someone he cared about and, worse, was responsible for.

He knew intellectually that Hermione was a virgin and that there would probably be some pain for her; he knew that she had turned down the offer of an analgesic potion in case it dulled sensation generally. He thought he had braced his mind sufficiently to deal with it and he was honoured, he truly was, that she wanted him - him! - to be her first and perhaps her only full lover. Her tongue slicked across his again, insistently, making the pulse in his groin jump until he groaned aloud, and he started to slide into her as one drawn on by inevitable force, as she gasped and tilted her hips up to welcome him and her legs clamped round him to urge him further in.

He nerved himself to make the extra push and break through the barrier of her virginity, burying himself in her, and felt her stiffen almost imperceptibly at the sudden sharp sting - and he smelled the iron taint of blood and then her limbs were a vice, holding him in place to hurt or to be hurt and he broke away from the kiss and froze, rigid with shock. Seeing the fear in his face Hermione pressed her hands against his back, trying to hug him closer in reassurance. With a strangled cry he jerked himself away from her, breaking her hold. He threw himself as far away from her as he could without falling off the bed and curled into a tight ball, his arm raised to shield his head. Through the roaring in his ears he could hear his own teeth chattering with terror.

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Hermione bit her lip, pausing for a moment before shifting towards her lover. Carefully, slowly, she laid her palms flat against his back, not touching him anywhere else, making sure even the slightest move would free him from the contact if he wanted it to. "Severus?" she whispered, fighting back the urge to cry. She shouldn't have rushed this, should have given him more time.... "Shhh... it's all right, love. It's all right." She wanted to cradle him in her arms and comfort him, but that would probably only make things worse.

Indeed, even that slight touch seemed to do more harm than good. After a frozen second he twitched his bare skin away from her touch and curled up even tighter, whimpering like a whipped dog and shaking his head from side to side in desperate denial.

She pulled away quickly, taking a wobbly breath. Stay calm, Hermione. You can do guilty crying later. She eased off the bed, moving around to kneel on the floor where he could see her if his eyes opened. "It's all right, Severus," she murmured, keeping her voice gentle and soothing. "It's all right... I'm sorry, dearest, I shouldn't have rushed you, I won't again, I promise...." He whimpered again, and she crooned wordlessly, reaching over very slowly to draw a blanket up over him. He'd always been denied any covering, while a prisoner, and it seemed to reassure him sometimes, and she couldn't think what else to _do_ if she couldn't touch him without hurting him more....

That seemed to be a moderately positive step, at least. He jerked in fright as he felt the blanket slide up over his body, but when he realized what it was he snatched at it, clenching his hand into a tight fist around the crumpled fabric, and pulled it close around his shoulders. He stopped the dreadful, broken whimpering and began to rock silently, tears running down his scarred cheeks.

Hermione's own eyes filled, and she wiped them hastily with the back of her hand. "It's all right," she repeated, clasping her hands tightly together to fight the temptation to reach out to him. "It's all right, Severus.... I'm sorry, I'm _so_ sorry, I should never have asked this of you... I never wanted to hurt you, not ever...." She gulped as her voice wavered, and forced it into soothing calm again. "Shhhhhh.... it's all right now, you're safe...."

But nothing seemed to help - even the sound of her voice made him flinch and jerk as if he thought she was going to hit him. Unable to help herself, or him, Hermione let out a muffled sob and at that, instead of flinching again Severus put out his hand blindly and awkwardly, lying on his right side as he was, somehow found her arm and gave it a gentle pat. "Don't," he said thickly and almost inaudibly. "Please don't cry" - although tears continued to stream down his own face and soak the pillow under him.

"I c-can't help it," she said softly, another sob escaping as she scrubbed at her eyes. "I love you so much, and I hurt you, and I didn't mean to...." She found herself leaning into his touch, and clasped her hands tighter to keep them away from him. "Severus, I'm so sorry...."

"Hush now, there's a good girl." He patted her arm again, more firmly this time. He had at least stopped crying himself, now, but his eyes were still closed and he seemed to be operating on auto-pilot. Hermione wasn't sure whether he knew who she was or whether, in his dazed state, he thought she was one of his Slytherins in need of comfort.

She reached up tentatively to take his hand, brushing it lightly against her cheek. "I'm sorry," she whispered again, taking a deep and wobbly breath. "I'm stopping now." Although it did seem to have helped, for some reason, it probably wouldn't do any good for her to _keep_ weeping all over him.

He grasped her hand back firmly, giving it a gentle squeeze, and his eyes drifted open and he nodded vaguely towards the drawer of the bedside table and murmured "Handkerchief." Hermione dutifully fetched it out and started to wipe her eyes, and he said "Blow!" very firmly and almost sternly. Then recognition started to flow back into his eyes like water and he shut them again, tightly. Still clutching her hand he uncurled enough to roll away from her and lie on his back with his head tipped back, his beak of a nose pointing at the ceiling. "Oh... _shit_."

She blew anyway, and then fetched another handkerchief, offering it to him. "Are you back with me?" she asked quietly. She was shaking, she realized rather belatedly. Being unable to help him felt horrible, far worse than being attacked herself. Still, she'd remember this for next time, should there be one - crying herself might actually be more of a help than not.

"I think so - worse luck. I don't mean _my_ bad luck" he added hastily, hearing her suck in her breath; "I mean yours. What a - bloody - you might have known I'd find some way to foul up." He blew his nose on the proffered handkerchief, impressively loudly, and then stared at the flickering shadows the candles cast across the ceiling. "Why do you bloody put up with me?"

"Because I love you," she said quietly, shifting up to sit cautiously on the very edge of the bed beside him. "Severus, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked this of you, I should have known I was rushing this...." Tentatively she reached out to brush the backs of her fingers against his cheek.

He put his own hand up to press her hand against the side of his face. She could feel the beginnings of stubble starting to come through, and the faint bare line of the scar that bisected his cheek, still damp with tears. "It wouldn't matter how fast or how slowly we took it, and it wasn't any fault of yours. There was always going to come a time when - it was the blood and, and knowing I must be hurting you. Even though I knew it was what you wanted, I was still too much of a bloody coward to face my own - experiences and give you what you needed. I am so very sorry. You deserve to spend your first time with somebody who is whole, in body and in mind, not with this - wreckage."

The blood and... oh, damnit. She should have thought of that. "If whole in body and mind was all I wanted, I could have had Fred or George Weasley for the asking," she said firmly, in the hope that that dreadful mental image would lessen the hold of some of the others. "As could any girl with a pulse, as long as she wasn't a Slytherin. I wanted _you_. Because I love you quite desperately and the thought of being with someone else makes me feel rather queasy." She leaned down to kiss his forehead lightly. "I love you," she whispered, her eyes stinging again. "I knew this wouldn't be easy, but I didn't care, I wanted _you_."

He reached up and brushed her hair out of her eyes, then cupped the side of her face and drew her down lightly into a proper kiss, slow and gentle and careful on both sides. An answering pulse in his groin reminded him of unfinished business - if he would ever be able to finish it. When her mouth finally lifted away from his he lay gazing up at her. Tears prickled in his own eyes, as in hers, but the corners of his long lips twitched upwards slightly. "I refute your description of the Weasley twins as 'whole in mind' - they barely make one half-wit between them. But I wouldn't wish being in love with me on anyone, let alone on someone as - as brave and unspoiled as you are." He made a sudden convulsive effort and somehow managed to push himself up to a sitting position. "What I need - need - " He stopped, feeling his teeth still chattering. Took a deep breath. "...cup of tea," he finished in a rush.

Hermione laughed suddenly, a slightly hysterical laugh, and stood up. "The universal panacea for all ills," she agreed, smiling at him. "I think I could use one, too." She padded over to the tea-service in the corner. A few minutes later, she rejoined him on the bed, handing him his mug and cradling her teacup between her hands. "I wish I could do more to help. I know you keep telling me it's silly, that I do a lot... but I still wish I could do more. And whether you'd wish it on me or not, I adore you and nobody else could possibly do."

They sat side by side in companionable silence, him under the blankets and her on top of them and both of them mother-naked. Severus sat sipping his tea and looking at Hermione under his lashes; bare though he was, the shivers which chased across his skin were caused not by cold but by lust and its uneasy, inevitable shadow: raw fear. Her own shivers, he assumed, were due to cold, and he was a selfish bastard for enjoying the sight of her unselfconscious nakedness on such a chilly evening. As if to point the moral, a gust of rain blew against the window, and the same gust sent the surface of the lake rising and slapping against the glass. "You should get back under the covers," he said, replacing the emptied mug on the bedside table with a definite click.

Hermione smiled at him rather unhappily, stood up and leaned forwards to place a kiss on his hairline, laying her cool hand lightly on his shoulder. Then she padded round to the other side of the bed and he felt her slide in between the sheets at his back.

Severus sat hunched at the edge of the bed with his back half turned to her, steadying himself with his hand against the mattress, his head hanging. "I know you do," he said quietly. "Adore me, I mean. But that just makes me the more culpable, for ruining your first time by my fucking - weakness. It's supposed to be the experienced older man coaxing the reluctant virgin, isn't it?" he said bitterly, and Hermione knew the scorn in his voice was for himself, not for her. "Not an eager virgin and an older man who can't stop bloody shaking because he's much too bloody experienced in all the wrong ways."

Hermione laid her hand gently on his bowed shoulder again. "Well, _technically_ I'm not an eager virgin any more - not that I'm not still eager," she added hastily, seeing the old bitter, closed look settle over his face like a mask, "but I think _technically_ I stopped being a virgin about twenty minutes ago. So you don't have to worry about it being my first time any more, because now we're just going to go ahead nice and quietly for the second time. Much less pressure."

"Much less," he agreed, with a flash of a rather wobbly smile. "But I can't promise not to panic again. Part of me - part of me automatically associates penetrative sex with rape, now. Since I never... since my experience of consensual sex was pretty sporadic that - horrible - what happened last year has become the dominant sexual experience in my life, I suppose."

"Despite all my extensive course-work aimed at getting an Outstanding in foreplay?" Hermione asked, her own smile equally wobbly and slightly hurt.

"No penetration, you see. It's been - lovely, but it doesn't feel much like anything _they_ did to me, so it doesn't really help me to get past what they did to me."

"You must know - I'd never hurt you."

"That's not really the point, though. The problem is that part of me thinks that I'm going to hurt you - that by having full sex with you I'm - somehow doing to you what they did to me. Which, intellectually, I know is ridiculous, and I do - desire you. Very much. You can see I'm still - " He sat up straighter to free his hand, and gestured helplessly at the evidence of his own arousal. "Not that that proves anything, really, because so I was when they...."

"It is. Ridiculous, I mean. I know you'd never deliberately harm me, and far from doing something against my will you'd be doing what I want very much indeed." She laid her hand along his jaw and turned his head towards her, and he permitted himself to be kissed gently, sighing.

"Come on, love" she said coaxingly. "Practice makes perfect." He quirked an eyebrow at her. "I mean if, if the only way you can overcome the - the bad associations those - creatures beat into you is to have so much good sex that it outweighs the bad, we might as well make a start. I imagine we have a long way to go."

"Considering how many fucking times they - and how much they fucking hurt me we'd have to be screwing about five times a day from now till next Easter to make much of a bloody difference" he said bitterly, his anger and pain making him deliberately coarse.

"Sounds good to me!" Hermione replied cheerfully, placing her hands on his shoulders and urging him to turn and face her.

Severus gave a throaty little chuckle. "If it comes to that, it doesn't sound too bad to me either" he admitted, and allowed himself to be drawn down gratefully into her embrace.

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Afterwards they lay curled tightly together for a few moments, gasping for breath... and then, reluctantly, he lifted his head. He would have been quite content to lie there still entwined with her, his face buried in her soft hair, but he should move off her at least...

"Don't!" Hermione whispered pleadingly as she felt him move, her arms tightening around him. "Don't... leave me, please, not yet...."

He looked down at her in surprise. Far from wanting him to get off her - and he knew he must be heavy and that there must be at least some discomfort for her - she looked ready to cry at the prospect. "Er... why?" he asked, not moving. The thought of being held in place was deeply unnerving, even now, but she didn't actually have enough leverage to keep him in place if he didn't want her to....

She bit her lip, loosening her grip on him and burrowing her face into his neck. "I just... don't want it to stop," she whispered. "I've wanted this for so long, just to... to _be_ with you like this, I don't want you to leave me yet...."

He swallowed hard. It was still... difficult, but he reigned in his unreasoning fear with less effort than usual. The prospect of just... staying like this, curled together as intimately as the human body could be, not because she wanted pleasure of him but because she wanted HIM... was not a frightening one, although it might have been with someone else.

He kissed her, gently, and nestled against her. "Let me know when I get too heavy," he murmured, smiling a little. "Until then... I don't really want to move, either."

"Good." She sighed contentedly, and kissed the side of his neck. "I love you, you know."

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Eventually, of course, he did have to move, not only for fear of crushing her but because her hips were starting to dig painfully into his own. Hermione settled down comfortably at his side, with her head resting on his shoulder and his arm securely tucked around her, and sighed contentedly. "In case my great enthusiasm earlier didn't properly convey this," she murmured, kissing his collarbone lightly, "that was bloody marvellous. Absolutely worth waiting for... and I promise, I don't feel even the slightest bit hurt or taken advantage of." She paused. "Well, except for where I bit my lip trying not to scream in your ear, but I assure you, that was entirely worth it."

"You should always let your lover know if he makes you want to scream," he growled, "always provided it's with pleasure. As it was, the noises you were making were very - gratifying to my masculine ego. And I'm sure I made quite a few noises myself - and I don't just mean when I threw a panic-fit, dramatically embarrassing though that was. I certainly felt like making plenty of noises." Hermione felt and understood his slight flinch as he brushed off the memory of the noises he had made under other, much darker circumstances. "That was - electrifying. I'm looking forward to the re-sits already."

"I'll make as much noise as you _like_, as often as you want to do this again... I was trying to restrain myself from getting too noisy in case it bothered you," she admitted. "Not that I was really succeeding. You utterly destroyed my self-control, and I enjoyed every minute." She kissed his shoulder. "Except for the panic-attack... which I'm still sorry about, I knew this probably wouldn't be easy for you...."

"Having your self-control destroyed like that by somebody you trust and want is, is liberating, and I'm flattered that you found it so with me. It's a lesson that I re-learn every morning that you lay hands on me, and make me wriggle and gasp when I had intended to be all darkly smouldering and mysterious. But it is - ghastly - to be driven through those sort of barriers by somebody you don't want."

He sighed and kissed the corner of her eye, that being all he could reach without disturbing her from her comfortable nest in his embrace. On one level he still had a deeply-ingrained conviction that if she truly knew how abjectly they had degraded him, what they had reduced him to, she would recoil: but he also had a strong suspicion that his deeply-ingrained conviction was pathological, part of the damage that had been done to him, and a libel on Hermione's common-sense and compassion.

"When I was - last year -" he began thickly, his tongue stumbling in his awkwardness, "they-they broke down my barriers so hard and so often I forgot I was allowed to have bloody barriers. Between the, the assaults and the sensitizing potions and the bloody Cruciatus I was so - overloaded that every time they, they took me I howled and jumped and climaxed without any kind of mental or physical defence. I was just - an instrument for them to play on, to see what kind of _sounds_ they could get out of me this time."

Hermione made a sad noise of sympathy and cuddled down against his side, resting her small hand on his ribs like a benediction. And he knew, he did know, that this was a strange and sad conversation to be having with his young lover, on a night which would be one of the memorable milestones of her life; but he knew her and trusted her well enough by now to know that she would value his trust, his willingness to confide, he trusted that she would want whatever was good for him and that it would be patronising for him to "spare her", as if she were a child. Their lovemaking had left him feeling as if his belly and loins were almost dissolving into a kind of tingling languor, and here and now, safe in her warmth and her accepting regard, it suddenly seemed possible to talk about the sexual invasion he had suffered without choking or freezing with embarrassment. Here in her arms he could let the memory flow and, perhaps, begin to let it go.

"_Given which_," he resumed in his best dry, classroom voice, "it would I think have been remarkable if I had managed to get through my first experience of penetrative sex since, since all that without throwing some sort of fit. And at least we got through it comparatively painlessly and without too much embarrassment. At least I didn't vomit down your cleavage, or wet myself. And now that I've _done_ the screaming terror and the rolling up into a sobbing pathetic ball and seen that it was all right, that you didn't hurt me and I didn't hurt you, I'm much less likely, I think, to have a similar attack in future."

Technically, of course, she was in his arms - or arm, at any rate. He hugged her, hoping she wouldn't take his next words as a criticism. "But if I do start to panic and pull away from you, let go of me - take your hands off me and don't try to restrict me. Only Minerva can get away with holding me tightly when I'm actually in the throes of a panic-fit - and that's only because she can do The Voice, which reaches straight into my hind-brain and makes me think I'm eleven again, and trying to explain why and how I just hexed the legs off of the staff dining-table in front of the whole school. The words 'Mr Snape - in my office, _now_' still bring me out in a cold sweat, but at least it gets me babbling excuses instead of whimpering, and once I remember that I can talk it makes things - easier."

"I will. I'm sorry I didn't realize quickly enough, this time... although in my defence, that was a fairly distracting moment." She smiled ruefully, snuggling against him. "It... hurts... to see you so distressed," she said softly. "I want so badly to reach out to you, to comfort you, but I can't... I felt so guilty for putting you through that. I should have _thought_, damn it... it would have taken five minutes to take care of the technicalities with a transfigured sex-toy or a conveniently sized carrot or something, and it wouldn't have made you any less the first, for me... but it would have made it a lot easier for you. I'm sorry I didn't think of it in time to be useful...."

"_I_ should have thought, and not put all that - trauma and guilt onto you on what should have been a wholly happy occasion. But I thought - well, I expected that with all that - hands-on experience things would be more... um, stretched. I didn't think there would be enough blood to notice. But I was forgetting that smell is such a powerful emotional trigger that even a little blood, coming unexpectedly and under such circumstances, might be enough to...." He coughed slightly. "And of course I should have considered that I am - somewhat over-endowed in the olfactory department. And perhaps also somewhat, um - more generously proportioned than the average carrot" he added, blushing rather.

"That you are," she agreed, smirking in pleased memory. "And in all ways much better. And I feel rather the same... I mean, that I made you so distressed and frightened on what should have been a happy occasion. I knew it wasn't going to be easy for you, I should have been more careful... but despite the rocky start, I think we did eventually manage a very happy occasion indeed. I know I, for one, was _extremely_ happy towards the end, there."

"I was positively ecstatic." He tilted her chin up and bent to kiss her, slowly and deeply. Hermione turned into his embrace and put her arms round him rather cautiously. When his back didn't stiffen at the touch she hugged him and kissed him back with interest. Severus felt like laughing and shouting - like falling asleep in her arms and waking up in them in the morning, and never going anywhere else ever again. Past the haze of her hair and the fine curl of her ear, he glimpsed the stone serpents around the fireplace, hissing to each other in what looked like amused approval of his prowess, and he supposed that they liked to know that the master of Slytherin was as skilful in bed as in deviousness and debate.

He went on kissing Hermione until it was stop or smother, and then a few seconds more just in case, and then flopped back against the pillows breathless and triumphant and already half erect again. "Five times a night might be a bit much in my condition," he gasped, "but if you want to try again in an hour or so I'm sure I should be able to rise to the occasion. Bearing in mind that you don't have classes tomorrow, and can sleep in. And we'll have to re-arrange the rota so you can spend the morning - or indeed the day. I want to have a long, leisurely breakfast in bed with you and then maybe do a bit of - practical revision. If I am up to it."

Hermione made happily incoherent noises for a moment, then buried her nose in his shoulder. "Mmmm.... and I thought I was impressed before. You are truly amazing, my love, do you know that? I am so very lucky to have you...." She trailed kisses up from his shoulder, along his neck, until she could kiss his lips gently. "And believe me, Professor McGonagall is going to have to drag me out of here bodily to make me leave you before I absolutely have to. Breakfast in bed sounds wonderful... and then we can... what was it you suggested earlier? A re-sit?" She pouted at him, and kissed the tip of his nose. "I hope that doesn't mean I didn't perform satisfactorily in the first exam."

"Oh no," he said earnestly. "Yours was a flawless exercise. Speaking of which, Adrian is always telling me that I need more - exercise, that is - and I can't think of a nicer way of getting it. But I feel that there were several aspects of my own performance which I need to work on. As often as possible."

She sat up, giving him a long, searching look. He appeared to be serious. "Severus Snape, are you actually trying to tell me that it can get better than that? Because I'm not sure I believe you, but you are _very_ welcome to try to prove it!"

"Oh, I mean to - often. Wake me up in... about an hour and we'll make a start" he said drowsily, sliding down into sleep.

* * *

**Author's note:**

May Day is the First of May, the day of which Beltane is the eve, and one of the four traditional Celtic quarter-days. Beltane is associated both with fertility and sexuality and (in continental Europe, under the name Walpurgisnacht) with witchcraft.

The word "Mayday" is also an international distress signal, similar to "SoS". It is believed to be derived from the French _m'aidez_ or, more correctly, _venez m'aider_ - "Come to my aid".

My next project will be to update my Fanfiction. net How-to page to take account of the latest update to the site. It can be found at **www. whitehound. co. uk/Fanfic/ffn_how-to. htm**, and should be up-to-date by mid May.


	27. 24 Intromission

I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

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**24: INTROMISSION**

[Apologies for the long delay in updating, and for the fact that this is not a proper chapter, but only a chapter-ette. Over the last couple of years I seem to have spent more time working on my PC than doing work on it, if you see what I mean - two major upgrades; two hard-drive failures; two PSU failures; one CPU overheat; one flaky mainboard and a partridge in a pear tree - and Dyce has had a baby: a very happy event but one which leaves her little time for writing. In addition, all the chapters up to #23 had been at least partially written years ago so it was just a matter of stitching together what we already had and filling in the blanks, but now we are sailing into barely-charted territory for which all we have is a handful of rough notes, and the chapters have to be written almost from scratch.

We were intending to do a proper chapter for Christmas, but then Dyce's spousal other got the 'flu' and my PC folded completely, with the result that it had to go away to see an engineer and didn't come back until 7:30pm on Christmas Eve. So I decided to do this little stocking filler to let our faithful readers know that the story hasn't been abandoned and a new chapter is in progress and will be along soon, or at least once Dyce's daughter has finished teething.]

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Ever since The Event last summer, the axis of awfulness, he had felt directionless and unstrung, like a dropped puppet. [Had been a puppet, dancing on the Dark Lord's strings. Latterly, dancing on the strings of anyone of his tormentors who ordered him to dance.] But right now feeling unstrung felt good, it felt like luxury, as he lay flopped across the bed and watched Hermione through the half-open bathroom door.

He smiled to himself, remembering that she had let him in - she had welcomed him in and made him one with her, she had _accepted_ him at the most fundamental level, and he couldn't have kept from smiling if he'd wanted to. There was still a layer of misery and self-doubt in him which thought that it ought to think that this intromission, this penetration, was a dreadful thing he should never have done, least of all to someone he cared about and was in some measure responsible for: but try as he might, watching Hermione bouncing around in his shabby bathroom, glowing with health and happiness and singing to herself slightly off the key above the sound of the taps running, he just couldn't convince his rational self that he had done her any harm. Far from it, from the look of her, and the look of her was very nice indeed - she was trim, compact yet womanly, with gently curving breasts and hips and a neat triangle of gold-brown fuzz which made him raw with desire, and the memory of the sensation of her arms round him, of himself moving inside her and the soft blanket of her hair, was impressed into his skin; overwriting, at least for the moment, the memory of other touches.

He rolled over onto his back, still keeping Hermione in his field of view, but now he could see the window and the bright day beyond it as well. He had a sudden urge to be outside with her; not simply to be having sex with her, as overwhelmingly pleasant as that was, but to sit on the grass or walk by the lake and just be with her, and not to have to worry about security, or secrecy. A Friday in term-time with exams on the way was a bad time to be thinking of romantic strolls in the grounds, which would be full of furiously-revising students all ready to become an attentive audience: but it occurred to him that he might ask Albus or Minerva for permission to take Hermione - or the rest of Team Severus, for that matter - into Teachers' Farthing, the small, walled garden overlooking the lake which was reserved for the use of the school staff. After all, as his helpers they were practically staff themselves.

Of course, even in Teachers' Farthing there would be the prying, knowing eyes of his colleagues to think about: but they were moving, he thought, towards the point where they would be willing to go public about their relationship - even if he still didn't fancy the idea of being gawked at by too many students. He still remembered being hung up and stripped in front of a jeering audience of his fellow students on a June day over twenty years ago, and the end of a romance that had never properly begun.

This one, however, was off to a flying start. As Hermione stood in the bathroom doorway, unembarrassed and mother-naked except for the towel with which she was towelling her explosion of hair, and smiled at him ...

... as she sauntered naked across the stone-flagged floor and slipped into bed beside him ...

... as she welcomed him into her arms, into _her_, and wrapped her arms around his ribs and her heels behind his thighs (the one real and the one false), gasping out little keening noises as he rocked and slid against her, inside her and his neck clunk-clicked unpleasantly as he contorted himself so he could kiss her lingeringly at the same time, but what was a cricked neck more or less when his whole body was singing with pleasure? ...

... as she assisted his more than usually unsteady steps to the bathroom and then perched herself on the edge of the bath, glowing gently, ready to scrub his back as he sluiced himself under the hot shower which eased muscles that were sore from so much unaccustomed exercise ...

... he couldn't keep the smile from turning up and turning into a grin, sheer happiness with a side-order of smugness stretching the much-abused corners of his mouth every time he looked at her or thought about her or remembered the feel of her skin against his.

In the back of his mind he knew that he was adrift in a little bubble of light and hope, and beyond the walls of the bubble the memory of The Event pressed in all around him, waiting to crush him back into misery and degradation, as indeed it had done only the previous night. But the bubble was not, in fact, a particularly fragile one, and he hoped in time that it would become like a diving-bell in the deep ocean, able to withstand all pressures.

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**Author's note:**

Yes, the title is meant to be spelled that way.

We're told in the books that the students finish classes early on Fridays, and also that NEWT-level students get free lesson-periods for extra study and revision.

"Clunk-click every trip" was the slogan of a British advertising campaign of the 1970s, intended to encourage the use of car seat-belts.


	28. 25 A Dinner of Herbs

I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us.

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**25: A DINNER OF HERBS**

_Dear Mum and Dad _

_I've written about twelve drafts of this letter already, and I really haven't been able to come up with a tactful and graceful way of putting this. So here it is: I'm seeing someone. I have been for a while. And it's complicated. _

_You see, the person I'm seeing was, until very recently, a teacher. Severus Snape. He's the one who was injured so badly that we had to call Adrian in, a while ago, if you remember. And before that I know I talked a lot about the Potions teacher who hates me. Well, hated me. Obviously things have warmed up a bit now. _

_Before you start worrying, he's no longer on the staff, and he was the youngest out of all the teachers, just in his thirties. I don't know if Adrian told you anything, but I didn't give you any details at the time. He wasn't just injured, really, but tortured for a long time and very badly. He's lost limbs, although he's learning to manage with prosthetics now, and obviously there was a lot of trauma. He couldn't be left alone for a while, and I was one of the volunteers to stay with him, and we've been spending a lot of time together and one thing sort of led to another. _

_And no, neither of us is being taken advantage of. I'm not taking advantage of the emotional connection caused by being his carer, and he's certainly not playing on his former position as my teacher! It's just that we've finally had a chance to talk as equals, and get to know each other properly. _

_I love him very much. I know it's going to be very difficult, and it hasn't exactly been a bed of roses so far, believe me! But he's worth it. You don't know how wonderful it is to be able to talk about things with someone, like Arithmancy and complicated ethical issues and... well, the things Harry and Ron and most other people would never understand in a hundred years. _

_Please don't worry about me. I'm very happy, and this is actually quite a good thing from your point of view, because Severus is under permanent armed guard and secluded right in the middle of Hogwarts and under all sorts of protective spells and things, so the more time I spend with him the safer I am. While I'm seeing him every day, I can't go running off with Harry and getting into trouble, either, because Severus worries and I really don't want to upset him. _

_I worry about Harry, of course, but Ginny will keep an eye on him. And he does have Ron, even if Ron's completely unreliable when it comes to stopping Harry from doing things. Any things. Ever. ﾠ _

_I'm putting this in the ordinary mail because owls can be intercepted. If you send the reply to Adrian he can drop it off next time he checks in. _

_All my love, and I miss you awfully, _

_Hermione _

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"And the best of British luck to you," Severus said as Draco sauntered across from the door, and Hermione stuffed the last course-book into her bag and prepared to leave. "I've a feeling you're going to need it."

"I certainly will." Hermione checked her bag. "And thank you for offering to join me... but you don't know what Ron's like when he really explodes. Believe it or not, you never have really seen him at his worst. He's too frightened of you." She loved Ron and Harry, but they had nasty tempers at the best of times... and no time involving Severus Snape was one of the best.

"It's gratifying to know that I can still inspire terror in the Weasley breast," said Severus, settling himself comfortably back against the pillows, "even in my current condition;" and Draco halted with hisﾠhand on the bed-post.

"Do tell," he said silkily, with a glint in his grey eyes which made Severusﾠregard him with trepidation. "What burr has the Weasel got up his kilt this time?"ﾠ The blue-green hound on the back of his hand wagged its tail and danced a few bouncing steps, pleased to be in Severus's presence.

"Oh, this might be enough to make him go berserk even at you" Hermione answered Severus, then sighed, and gave Draco a rather lopsided smile. "He and Harry don't... know. About me and Severus. And I want to tell them... well, not first, obviously, but before any big announcements. I don't like keeping secrets from them. It's a bad example for Harry, if nothing else, and I've just almost got him trained not to hide things from me."

"Oh, wow." Draco twirled himself around the bed-post, stretching and preening like a cat. "That's just - priceless. You mean to tell me I've known for over a month, but the Sainted Potter and his Merry Moron are still in the dark?"

"Don't give yourself airs!" Severus snapped, nettled for Hermione's sake even though privately he still rather enjoyed the idea of his godson having an excuse to lord it over Potter. "We had to tell the people who were, uh, patient-sitting me, because the risk of them working it out for themselves was too great."

"But you told me about you two before you told the Head_master_ or McGonagall -"

"Enough!" In truth, when he thought about it - although the past, even a month or two back, was fuzzy in his mind with sleep and disjointments of memory - Longbottom had known before even he had, Minerva and Lovegood had worked it out for themselves, Poppy and Adrian still didn't know and only Albus had needed to be told. But there would be time enough to talk it through with Draco later: he didn't want to hold Hermione up by entangling her in his godson's particular combination of ego and craving for reassurance, when she was already jittering with nerves and keyed up for the confrontation ahead.

Hermione snorted, giving Draco an amused look as he posed and preened. "We told you because Pansy had figured it out on her own, and we weren't sure how many people she was going to drop hints to in the Slytherin common room. Severus wanted you to hear it from him first, in case it hurt your feelings that Pansy found out before you. But the odds that Pansy was ever going to tell Harry and Ron were quite slim, so there wasn't as much of a rush with them." She leaned down to kiss Severus's cheek gently, squashing down the nerves for the dozenth time as Draco politely turned his back to them. "If you hear the howling of an enraged beast, don't worry about it. It's just Ron."

"Whereas Potter's will be more of a falsetto screech?" Draco enquired sweetly. Behind him, Severus gave a snort of amusement.

"Harry isn't quite as loud, mostly. And he's sort of more used to Severus now." Hermione sighed, hitching her bag up over her shoulder. "Right. I'm off. If I'm late this afternoon it's because they're acting like toddlers. There's fresh tea made, Draco, if you want some." Draco did his best, but his skill at making tea was still spotty.

Severus watched her go with trepidation.ﾠ Despite his amusement at Draco's antics and a certain amount of jealousy over Potter and Weasley's claim on her loyalty, he really didn't want to be the cause of a rift between Hermione andﾠthe idiot boys.ﾠ Somewhat to his own surprise, he realised that he didn't want to drive a wedge between himself and Potter, either, just when they seemed - amazingly - to be getting along quite well.

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Hermione collared Ron on his way out of the common-room - collared literally, hauling him back into the common-roomﾠby the back of his robes, and ignoring his startled protests. "We were going to study, Ron."

"I was just - "

"Going to the lavatory?"

Ron flushed. "No!"

"Then it can wait. Come on."

Harry was sitting in one of the armchairs, flicking through his Transfiguration textbook without really looking at the pages. "Hey, Hermione, maybe - "

"Up!" Hermione ordered briskly, trying to conceal her inner quaking. "We're going up to your room. It's empty now, isn't it?"

"Well... yes, but..." Harry frowned, and then blinked suddenly. "Oh. Sure." He slammed the book closed and stood up. "Let's go."

Hermione frowned too. She distrusted that air of suddenly having worked something out. It wasn't like Harry to work things out... well, it was, but not in this context. "I need to talk to you. Both of you."

"You could have just said so," Ron grumbled, rubbing his neck as she released his robes. "All right, all right, I'm coming. We'll have a chat. But I don't see - "

"Well, if you can wait two minutes, I'll _tell_ you," Hermione snapped, feeling extremely rattled.

"All right, all _right_, keep your hair on..."

Hermione hustled them both up to their dormitory, slammed the door, locked it magically in _flagrant_ violation of the school rules, turned to face them... and couldn't think of a single thing to say. Not one word. "Uhm..."

"What's up?" Ron brightened suddenly. "Old Snape giving you a hard time, is he?"

He snickered, and Hermione swore under her breath, struggling not to blush.ﾠ Damn, damn, damn.ﾠ "He is not!"ﾠ She took a deep breath. "Look, I... I need to talk to you about something. And it's important, and I'd really appreciate it, Ron, if you could just _listen_ to me instead of trying to be clever."

Ron looked hurt. "All right. All I said was - "

"I know what you said." Hermione took another deep breath. It didn't help as much as she would have liked. "Please, just... listen."

Harry hadn't said a word, sitting on the edge of his bed, watching her with an oddly intent look. Ron went over and flopped onto his bed, leaning back on his elbows and scowling a little. Ron hated being told to shut up... well, she was off to a wonderful start, wasn't she?

"All right. Well. I wanted to talk to you about... well, you know I've been spending a lot of my time helping care for Professor Snape. And studying," she added pointedly. "And don't think I don't know that you two have been skiving off while my back is turned!"

"Not studying as much as all _that_," Ron muttered. "I know you only got Exceeds Expectations on a couple of essays."

"Studying more than you," Hermione said tartly. "Anyway. I've got to know him much better, obviously, since I've been, uh, helping care for him... so has Harry, actually, he's stopped by a bit..."

"Haven't got to know him as well as you have, of course," Harry said, grinning.

Hermione gave him a sharp look. That sounded almost as if... no, impossible. Surely. "Well, no. And he's really very interesting when you get to know him, he knows quite a lot about Arithmancy and Transfiguration, not to mention a _lot_ of wizarding history that Binns never mentions... and Potions, obviously, but - "

Ron rolled his eyes. " Look, Hermione, if this is about making us be nicer to him, again... you spend all your time hanging around him, even Harry goes down and plays cards with him, and I haven't been rude to him or _anything_. What more do you want?"

"Well, that's all been good, obviously. But there's also... I mean, I... Look, it's been a while, and..." Hermione drifted to a halt on a reef of embarrassment and half-completed sentences. How could it be so hard to get a perfectly simple sentence out? All she had to say was 'Severus and I are romantically involved, shut up Ron.' and it would be done.

"And..." Harry prompted.

"And... look, when you spend a lot of time with people, and get to know them... it's complicated, but..."

Ron sat up, frowning. "Come on, Hermione, spit it out."

Hermione felt her face heating up until she probably looked like a bushy-haired tomato. "I... I..."

Harry sighed, smiling wryly at her. "I think she's trying to tell us that she and Professor Snape are... can you call it dating if he never goes anywhere?"

Hermione blushed even harder. "Er - yes, um, how did you...? I mean..."

Ron was making bubbling noises, his face slowly getting pinker and pinker.

Harry shrugged. "I've seen you two together a lot. I mean, I know I'm not really good at this stuff, but... I know you pretty well, Hermione. The way you look at him when you don't think I'm looking was a bit of a hint, and when I started looking..."

"WHAT?"

Hermione winced. "Don't _shout_, Ron."

"YOU AND THAT - ? WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING, HERMIONE?" Ron came up off the bed as if jet-propelled, bellowing like a skinny bull. "HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? WHEN? I'LL KILL HIM!"

"No, you won't," Hermione said firmly, stepping forward and poking Ron in the stomach with her wand... not very gently, either. "Don't you even think about it, Ronald Weasley. I'm a grown woman - "

"You're a student!" Ron's volume was only slightly lessened, even though he was now snarling through gritted teeth. "And he's a teacher! And a git! And - "

"_I_ am almost three years over the age of consent, _he_ hasn't been teaching since well before he and I started... well... caring for each other, and he is not a git!" Hermione's temper was up now too, and she jabbed Ron in the stomach again. Wand safety be damned.

"Ron, mate, I wouldn't waste time shouting," Harry said philosophically. "I mean, you know how Hermione is once she makes up her mind."

"HE'S A SLIMY SLYTHERIN BASTARD AND HE'S PROBABLY USED A POTION ON HER OR SOMETHING - "

Hermione very nearly slapped him. "He has not!" she snarled right back. "And that is a _very_ serious accusation, Ron, and a very stupid one, since he's only just even able to get out of bed by himself, and we started... well, caring well before that, and do you seriously think he, he asked Neville or Luna or Professor McGonagall to put a potion in my tea or something? Really?"

"Well... no, but..." Ron's hesitation was only momentary. "But you can't _really_ like him, Hermione, you're just... just feeling sorry for him, or something, you can't just - "

"I can, and I do." Hermione lifted her chin and glared at Ron. "I love him, and he loves me, and when the war's over we're going off together for a proper holiday and after that I might even stay here with him." She managed to bite back the 'so there', but only just.

Ron's mouth opened and closed soundlessly, his face going almost purple.

"Right, well, glad we've got that out in the open." Harry got up off the bed, giving Hermione a slightly rueful smile. "I'm... well, I'm not thrilled, exactly, but I'm glad you're happy. Really."

"GLAD SHE'S HAPPY WITH THAT... THAT..."

"I suppose." Harry nudged Hermione firmly towards the door. "He's going to be doing this for a while. You might want to go now, before he starts throwing things."

Hermione blinked. "Throwing things?"

"Sometimes. Don't worry, I'll handle it."

She hugged Harry suddenly, and while he seemed startled he did seem to like it. "Thanks, Harry," she whispered. "I mean it."

"No problem." He hugged her back, then shoved her towards the door again. "Off you go."

Ron started yelling again before she even got the door open. By the time she was halfway down the stairs, Harry was shouting back. She felt a little guilty for leaving, but... well, no. After all the time she'd spent acting as a go-between for _them_, Harry could take a turn.

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"Well", Draco said, grinning, "how'd it go? Picking guts off the chandeliers, were we?" Severus winced and made an irritable shushing noise, looking at Hermione apprehensively.

"It's still going, really."ﾠ Hermione went over to perch on the arm of the couch, running a hand through her hair.ﾠ She'd done that often enough that she probably looked like a gorse bush... kissing's still in season, she thought, and smiled a little despite still being upset.ﾠ "Harry threw me out when Ron started bellowing, he said he'd deal with it.ﾠ He really is better at that... Ron and I tend to just make each other angrier and angrier."

"That's because you're persistently reasonable at him," Draco said, "and the Weasel is entirely driven by his balls and his belly, so reason just annoys him."

"To be fair," Severus said, holding up his hand to forestall a possible explosion from Hermione, "the boy must have a brain of some sort, since he beat Anwar to the top spot in the chess club three years running.ﾠ He just has no interest in applying it to things that don't immediately grab his attention, which is nearly everything.ﾠ You know that's so," he added, giving Hermione a wary, cautiously hopefulﾠlook.ﾠ "Do I understand you that Potter...?"

"Harry apparently already knew... or strongly suspected, at the very least." Hermione ran her hands through her hair again and smiled ruefully at Severus. "I've been giving myself away when I look at you again. Harry wasn't jumping for joy, exactly, but he said that he's glad I'm happy, and he meant it, I know him well enough to be sure about that. He won't make any trouble... but Ron might."

Severus gave a slightly cracked, wild little laugh.ﾠ "I don't know whether to be delighted - I am delighted," he added, with a quelling glare at Draco, who snickeredﾠ- "that this isn't going to lead to a resumption of hostilities with Potter, or annoyed that we seem to be so bloody transparent that half the bloody school's worked it out already.ﾠ It's not the standard one expects of a professional spy, is it?"ﾠ As Hermione opened her mouth to answer, there came the sound of raised voices from the corridor outside and he turned to her in wild surmise, uncertain whether to be amused or alarmed: there was always the possibility that it might be a genuine attack, and his wand slipped into the palm of his hand without conscious thought, as if it had grown there.

"Sounds like the Weasel has slipped his leash" Draco said happily, as a muffled unmistakable voice bellowed "SNAPE!"

"Oh, damn it, he got away from Harry."ﾠ Hermione stood up, a bit reluctantly.ﾠ "All right. I'll go out there and deal with him - "ﾠ She paused, and glanced down at her lover, smiling suddenly.ﾠ "Unless you'd rather I didn't.ﾠ You said a while ago that you wanted someone to shout at... he's all yours, if you want him!"

"I'm sure I don't remember saying any such thing," Severus said primly over the background noise of confused shouting, "but I can't - be quiet Draco, I didn't ask for a Greek chorus of hyaenas - possibly expect you to deal with an enraged wizard when his quarrel is primarily with me - although I'm sure," he added very quietly out of the corner of his mouth, "that you'd appreciate a ringside seat."

Hermione grinned at him, and he shook his hair back into some sort of order and tried to look sternly professorial and not like somebody who'd had too much sex the night before, and not enough sleep.ﾠ "Draco: if you've _quite finished_, help me to my feet" (and thank God he had washed and dressed and put on his prostheses while Hermione was upstairs) "and then tell the guards to let Weasley in - and Potter, who I imagine will not be far behind."ﾠ He leaned his shoulders back against the carved serpents by the fireplace, who hissed and nodded to him and discreetly buoyed him up as with a snarl of "Out of the way, Malfoy!" Ronald Weasley erupted into the room although his wand, Hermione noted, was firmly tucked into Vincent Crabbe's belt.

As the redhead opened his mouth to bellow again, his pale skin white with fury and his freckles standing out so prominently they might have achieved independent flight, Severus forestalled him.ﾠ "_Mr_ Weasley", he said silkily, pushing off from the wall behind him to stand at his full height, his arms folded loosely across his chest and the wand dangling from his fingers.ﾠ The full, swinging sleeves and the scars which extended the corners of his mouth made him look even more like a brooding great bird of prey thanﾠhe had before, and Ron visibly swallowedﾠbefore rallying.ﾠ

"Snape," he said tightly.ﾠ "What the _fuck_ do you think you're playing at, making Hermione - "

"He hasn't made me do anything," Hermione snapped, folding her arms and glaring. "Honestly, Ron, that's tactless even for you. This is a very mutual relationship that makes us both happy, and if you're too immature to cope with that - "

"_You're_ too fucking immature - " Ron snapped, rounding on her.

"Oh, I am not!"

"You are six months younger than her by age, Weasley, and about six years by emotional maturity," Severus said frostily, "and as I understand it, seven months ago you found the idea that you might still be a virgin risible."

Harry, appearing breathlessly in the doorway at that very instant, winced visibly. "Ron, mate - " he began, but Ron ignored him.

"I went with somebody my own age, not - influence - impressionable girl - "

"And now we hear your true colours," Severus said softly, mantling the wings of his sleeves: "the arrogant pure-blood who thinks that witches are chattels who must marry as they are told..." He was distantly aware that he was probably being unfair, but he was hunting now and his instinct was to escalate, not defuse.

"He probably wants to chain her to his kitchen sink," Draco said happily, "just like that fat _hausfrau_ of a mother of his."

"What's it to you, Ferret?"

"Ron!" Hermione exclaimed, and he rounded on her.

"Can't you fucking-well see, he's trying to twist things the way he's twisted you. If I had my wand - "

"You would what?" Severus snarled, advancing on him. "Did you expect to find me still languishing in my sickbed, so you could attack an injured man - or were you planning on committing suicide?"

"I could take you any day - " Behind him, Harry put his hand over his eyes and sighed, and Draco made an expressive thumbs-down gesture..

Severus thrust his fierce, indigant face forwards, his hair visibly standing up like an angry cat's. "And do you really think that Hermione is a - a thing to be fought over like a - like a Quidditch prize! Or that she would choose a, a brainless primping sports-jock with the IQ of _woodworm_ over - "

"Better than a, a sleazy old man twice her age who thinks he's got some sort of _droit du seigneur_ over the students - "

"How DARE you - and you stay out of it!" he added, rounding on Draco who had just murmured "Oooo, posh words!" not quite too quietly to be heard.

"It's not _like_ that!" Hermione said heatedly, and Ron glowered at her. She could see that he was staying angry for longer than he might otherwise have done, because he felt himself surrounded by enemies.

"So you tell me what it was like," he snarled. "He's a _teacher_, Hermione."

"I am not her teacher now," Severus said hotly, "and I never will be. Do you imagine for one moment that if she had still been my student, I would have allowed myself - "

"I don't bloody know, do I - but if it's all so bloody above board why does it have to be such a dark bloody _secret_ - "

Hermione coughed apologetically. "Um - it's not like that. We haven't, uhm, gone public yet, but quite a lot of people know about it, really."

"Like WHO?"

"Well, uh - the Headmaster, and Professor McGonagall - the Headmaster was a bit disturbed but Professor McGonagall was all for it really. Draco here, of course and, um, Luna and Neville - Neville thought it was a good idea even before Severus did - and, uh, Pansy Parkinson and some people she knows..."

"Pansy? You told PANSY?"

"It wasn't, uh - " She smiled weakly at Harry beyond Ron's shoulder. "Pansy worked it out for herself, and we could hardly deny it, so... I would have told you earlier, really I would, but - "

"But she was afraid you would react exactly as you are doing" Severus - who had taken the opportunity to prop himself against the wall again - cut in. "I.e., like an unregenerate, salivating caveman."

"I just - I want what's best for Hermione - "

"But you are not the best judge of what is best for her - and do you imagine that I do not?" He gestured at the couch, the bed, and said firmly "Sit down - _all_ of you." When Ron looked like arguing, Severus glowered at him so fiercely that the younger man subsided, muttering.

"Now." He touched his fingertips together, his sleeves hanging down like a black waterfall. "Do not imagine for one moment that we did not consider the implications of my... status. But the reason student-teacher relationships of this... intimate nature are so frowned on, even when the student is of age, is because of the potential for favouritism; for the teacher using the promise of favouritism or the threat of disfavour to influence the student; for the student being coerced by a sense of submission to authority into doing something they might not otherwise have chosen to do; for the student conversely seeking to gain, ah, blackmail material to force the teacher to give them better marks; and for a teacher who is so inclined to predate generally on the student body and work his or her way through them seducing and then dropping persons too immature to deal with such rejection."

"_Yes_, exactly, so how come - "

Severus looked at the boy wearily - so young and so self-righteous. Potter on the other hand was watching him with an expression of mild concern in case, he supposed, he might suddenly fall over. The sensation of the stone serpents squirming behind his back still made him shudder but he found that they had been so thoughtful as to extend a loop of coil, making a small seat to take some of his weight without it being too obvious.

"In my own case, issues to do with favour or disfavour no longer apply. It was clear that I would not be well enough to resume teaching until after Hermione - Miss Granger - had taken her NEWTs, thus I had no influence over her marks: and I can assure you that I find the student body as a whole profoundly unattractive." He closed his eyes for a second and rubbed at the marks on his face, without really knowing that he was doing it - but it was oddly satisfying to be lecturing a seated audience again. "There was only the age difference and the - the issue of authority to consider. There was a risk, yes, a, a concern that Miss Granger might be influenced by her... desire to please a member of staff but we both felt that - well, that having seen me as - last year - " and he had the satisfaction, if you could call it that, of seeing Weasley flinch from the memory of that bloody ruin splayed across the hospital bed - "that she - well, that she would be more likely to see me as an object of pity rather than of authority, although she assures me that it isn't - only that."

"It really isn't" Hermione said, beaming fondly. "He's an authority because he's brilliant and I - well, I respect him very much, and I do care about his health too of course, but basically we just - being together, and everything, because of his health, we just - realised how much we liked each other. In, you know, lots of ways."

Severus flashed her a smile, open and warm and not at all smirk-like - and that in itself should tell Weasley something. "Precisely. And, well, we do intend to go public about our relationship soon, it's just a matter of doing so in a way which won't have Hermione eaten alive by the press while she's preparing for her NEWTs; and I shall be telling Adrian and Madam Pomfrey almost immediately because the matter is germane to - to a scientific paper we are working on together, and the subject is soon going to - come up - "

Draco gave an indescribably salacious cackle, and Severus felt himself blush scarlet - the more so when he heard Potter murmur "You see, you were right, he _has_ been giving her a hard time..."

Ron growled in inarticulate, baffled fury, and Severus looked at him in sudden pity and fellow-feeling. "You won't lose her friendship, you know," he said quietly. "Not if you don't do anything - stupid, to drive her away."

"I would have thought you'd want to keep us apart," Ron said sullenly, "in case I _turned her against you_."

Severus was unable to suppress the smug smirk which lifted the much-abused corners of his mouth. "You couldn't, even if you wanted to. And since I want what is best for her, I want her to have the company of those who love her - of _all_ those who love her - even in cases where I find her taste in friends... inexplicable."

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"It's not _that_ funny Albus."

"That depends on your sense of humour, dear boy. And do you feel the better for it?"

"Well..." Severus linked his fingers behind the back of his neck and stretched, working his spine from side to side. "I'm not sure about 'better', exactly, but - well, more like myself. More me."

"Well that's good news, isn't it? There was a time when we feared that we might not get you back..."

"I don't necessarily want to go back to where I started from, though - as amusing as shouting at Weasley may be. Although I wish..." He sighed and started to snap open the buckles that held the prostheses in place. "I miss - being whole. I shouldn't complain," he added, as Albus reached out to help him left-handed, his blackened right hand cradled against his ribs; "not compared with - it's getting worse, isn't it?"

"As we feared. Your promptness and skill bought me at least two years longer than I would otherwise have had, but you are right - I do not suppose I can last very much longer, as things are progressing."

"Albus I, I don't want - I'm nearly sure that if we could replace the arm with a full graft, instead of just removing it, we might be able to prevent the curse from migrating into your torso..."

Albus gazed at him over the half-moons of his spectacles. "I am an old man who must in the fullness of time die quite soon anyway, and my suffering this past year or two has been nothing compared with yours, and you are already doing quite enough by helping Horace to brew the Felix Felicis. I don't like the idea of you risking yourself trying to defuse Horcruxes or - or anything else dangerous: especially not for my sake."

"But what if I want to do it for my own sake?" Severus replied waspishly. "It's my bloody battle too, you know. And if I choose to take risks for you, that's my decision - unless you're saying that I have to be a _client_ forever?"

"I don't mean to - to treat you like a child - "

"Then don't! You know I know what I'm doing, otherwise I wouldn't do it." I hope, he thought, and suppressed a shiver - but in truth the danger was minimal. Really it was. "You know that thanks to my - my spilling my guts to him Riddle already knew that you were looking for Horcruxes, _before_ you located the Hufflepuff Cup, so it is likely that he has reinforced its defences - you're going to need every experienced curse-breaker you can get."

"We have Bill Weasley, and the Felix Felicis should protect him."

"The Felix Felicis should protect me, and maybe - maybe I am part of your luck. And it would be... satisfying, to undo some of the harm I did by - by breaking."

Albus looked at him sternly over the wire frames. "If I didn't know you better, I would suspect you of being deliberately manipulative - but I don't think you know how. Very well. Just... be careful. I do not wish to lose you, nor to have you any more damaged than you already are."

"Thank you," Severus said soberly. "And if you are right about the - Riddle hiding a Horcrux in the school, the Felix may enable us to find it - otherwise we could be a long time looking."

"I've already established that there were only a limited number of places he could have reached after his interview with me, given that he left by the main door ten minutes later.."

"Mm, but you don't know for sure, do you, that it happened then, and not while he was still a student - in which case it could be any bloody where." He drew a deep breath. "Albus I - "

"Yes, dear boy?"

"It's..." A quotation drifted to the surface of his mind: _Today I stand at the brink of an abyss: tomorrow I shall take a great leap forward_. "I think I'm ready to - well, not to go public about my relationship with Miss Granger yet, you're right that we need to be careful how we handle that, but, well - I and, uh, Hermione thought that I might go up to breakfast in the Great Hall tomorrow and... see how it goes."

"But this is splendid news!" Albus twinkled delightedly, causing Severus to feel perversely irritated. "Do you want me to make a welcoming speech, or...?"

Severus squinted at the offer from several angles, and sighed. "I think I'll just - _slither in_, quietly: I don't want to feel like the star turn in a three-ring circus. And there's something else."

"Whatever you wish, so long as it's not some hare-brained scheme to endanger yourself." He shed his dressing gown, which was patterned with little pink and green rabbits which were actively skipping about, and slipped into bed beside Severus, who leaned against him and sighed.

"Not - particularly, although I suppose there might be security issues. It's just - even though I don't much like being out in public being gawped at and I feel almost nearly safe in here and I have..." he gestured expressively at his books, his work-bench, at his beautiful magical music-box and his rag-rug and his glittering mobile and the strange silver gadget which spat out random curiosities - "nevertheless I'm so sick of these four walls I could scream, and now that the weather's warming up I wondered, um, whether it would be all right if I took my _cohorts_ into Teachers' Farthing." He flashed the older man a fleeting smirk. "They're reasonably domesticated, and Longbottom would be positively beneficial for the hydrangeas."

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Anwar and Bulstrode stayed with him, guarding his back as Albus left him and went through the door behind the teachers' table to take his place. To enter on the headmaster's arm, he felt, would be too dramatic: so he waited until Minerva arrived and then fell into step beside her, attempting to appear normal as his two guards peeled off and went to take their places at the Slytherin table.

Sliding into place with Minerva on one side and Filius hovering solicitously on the other, he clutched at the edge of the table and felt slightly sick, gazing down the long daylit length of the hall - no pointy hats on this informal occasion, just endless black shoulders and bobbing heads and he felt as if he was standing at the mast of a ship, looking out and down over a rough sea. He accepted the cup of tea which Minerva poured for him and helped himself absently to a boiled egg with butter and seasoning and two slices of toast, and as he tapped the top off the eggshell and added a sliver of butter he saw the movement, first at the Slytherin table and then spreading out like a ripple, students elbowing each other in the ribs, pointing, craning -

As he stared straight ahead, willing himself to breathe, the noise began - the roar of voices and then the applause, the storm of hand-claps and the thunderous slow banging on the tables... Overwhelmed, he looked for Hermione and saw her beaming at him fondly and then beside her Potter's green gaze met his and the boy gave him a cheeky grin and then elbowed Ron Weasley in the ribs until he too started, slowly at first and then with increasing vigour, to bang the table and standing surprisingly tall beyond them there was Longbottom, clapping wildly, and over there in Ravenclaw was Lovegood, smiling dreamily and performing some sort of curious two-handed wave...

At his own home table, most of the students seemed intent on cheering themselves hoarse but there halfway down on the wall side he could see an argument in progress and the beginnings of blows. Grimacing, he placed a hideous knitted woollen eggcosy over his boiled egg and rose to step down to the students' floor and pace along it with as firm and gliding a tread as he could manage. As the ovation grew even louder and wilder and many of the students rose to their feet, whooping, he drew level with the little knot of trouble and peered down his long nose at the combatants, several of whom tried to shrink away.

"While I wouldn't go so far as to say that I am fully recovered," he said softly in his roughened, ruined voice, "I am recovered enough not to stand any nonsense do I make myself clear, Bennet?"

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Severus looked up and smiled as Hermione, looking rather tousled, came in through the little gate which let out from Teachers' Farthing onto the narrow skirt of grass above the cliff. Only someone with special permission could even see it: to most of the students, it presented a smooth wall. As she approached she was pulling her explosion of hair back with her hands and lifting it to allow a cooling breeze to reach the nape of her neck: a move which incidentally accentuated her breasts for his happy appreciation. "How did you get on?"

"Better. She's surprisingly fast but I managed to keep hold of my wand this time, even when she tried to put a half-Nelson on me, and I got her with Immobilis so I suppose I won, really." Pansy shifted aside for her, grinning, and she sank down gratefully on the grass by Severus's feet.

"Congratulations are in order, I feel," he said gravely, "if you managed even that much." The May sunshine beat down on them, in the little garden beneath the castle walls, and beyond the gate he could see a brilliant glitter dancing on the surface of the lake. Somewhere behind him, beyond the rhododendrons and the chamomile path and the thorny little roses, he could hear Aurora and Septima discussing the upcoming exams, but apart from them he and his troops seemed to have the place to themselves for the moment. It had been an overwhelming feeling, that roaring, stamping ovation in the Great Hall, but feeling overwhelmed was exhausting and he was grateful for the peace and quiet of this walled little enclave - especially after a strenuous morning spent practising using his new wand left-handed. Casting wand-magic with one's non-dominant hand was always problematic, even without the added complication of that hand being artificial: but he was on the whole quite satisfied with the results.

"Soon, I think, I shall be well enough to give you a match myself" - he ignored Pansy's faint snigger - "and then we'll see how you handle an expert." The snigger erupted into a stentorian snort.ﾠ "At least, it's all good practice for your Defence practical."

Hermione fished her Slytherin-green ribbon out of her pocket, tying her hair up in a ponytail. She could take it off again when they left, but here she could wear his colours openly. "I've been practising for my Defence practical ever since I started at Hogwarts, or it feels that way," she said, smiling up at him. "Starting with that troll. But you're right, I do need to actually get better at it." Yet another snort, and Hermione fixed Pansy with her best McGonagall stare. "Pansy, would you like a cough-drop?"

"Oh, don't mind me," Pansy said with a grin, and Severus gave her a quelling look.

"Since Miss Granger has added one extra watcher to our party, Miss Parkinson, I feel it would be a good idea for you to work on your Potions revision for half an hour, and then change places with Jaquin so that he may do the same. If you encounter any problems, do not hesitate to ask my advice." He directed his gaze pointedly towards a garden bench and table about thirty feet away, and Pansy wrinkled her nose at him and went and sat down and began to pull notes out of her bag although still, he noted, keeping a wary eye on him and on the bushes around him.

"I don't wish to seem ungrateful," he said, pulling a wry face at Hermione; "I'm _not_ ungrateful, she and her troops have done more for me and showed me more care than I would have believed possible, but she's just so bloody _knowing_. Although I suppose the assumption that I am some kind of ever-ready Lothario is at least quite flattering."

Hermione made a face in return, hiking her knees up and wrapping her arms around them. "She does it with me too. And I don't even get the credit for being a... a vamp, or whatever the proper female equivalent of a Lothario would be. I am, as she informed me, a scrawny, toffee-nosed Gryffindor - but if that's what you want, then I'll do!" He frowned, a little, and she laughed. "It's all right... it was aﾠsort of compliment, in its own way. She and I have _always_ loathed each other, and it had nothing to do with house politics. We just get right up each other's noses. But she admitted that I make you happy, and that she's glad about that, which is probably about the first time we've ever really agreed about anything."

"I suppose that that's... civilised, to be able to not like somebody, and still have a sensible conversation and agree on common ground.ﾠ Obviously, I'd prefer it if the whole world was agreed on what a shining prize I'd found, so long as it kept its hands to itself - but still, if my Slytherin cohorts accept you and your Gryffindor ones accept me, even if it's only with a shrug and 'There's no accounting for tastes', we're doing better than I feared.ﾠ I just hope your parents will feel the same way."

"They will... well, not exactly." Hermione reached up to rest her arm on his leg, where the flesh and the prosthetic joined, in a carefully casual gesture. "They'll worry more, but they'll _want_ to like you more, too, because they'll know how much I love you. And when they meet you, they will like you." She smiled at him again. "Remember, they _raised_ a geeky intellectual with a temper... they do like them!" That mattered to her, and she thought to him as well - that aside from his age, his physical injuries, and everything else, her parents should like him as a person.

He laid his hand over hers - the real hand, warm and alive. "I still find it - improbable - that anyone should like me, but the reaction in the hall this morning was... I even saw Weasley applauding, at least after Potter poked him in the ribs, and several students came up to me afterwards and claimed to be pleased to see me."

"Of course they were. And you know I always am.ﾠﾠAre youﾠplanning to have lunch and dinner in the Great Hall too?"

"Dinner - yes, I think so - but I thought I'd have lunch out here, if the weather holds."ﾠ He nodded to Pansy, who was watching him covertly over her notes, and she nodded back.ﾠ "It's so - "ﾠ He lifted his hand to gesture, taking in the spring flowers starring the grassy slope, the little paths among the bushes, the towering grey-brown bulk of the castle at their back and the view through the arched, gated opening in the garden wall, down and out over the water, then laid his long fingers back over hers.

"It is, isn't it?" Hermione replied, gravely happy.ﾠ "I read in _Hogwarts: A History_ that it was originally called Teachers' Faring - for 'faring forth' to, you know?"

"I like that."ﾠ And he did: the idea of himself as a knight faring forth to battle, or even as a courtly lover strolling among the roses, was strong enough to overlay, at least for the moment, that crawling, pleading thing.ﾠ "And I suppose that I shall fare to the Great Hall again at dinner, to sample the fare.ﾠ Having bitten the bullet, I might as well chew it - if you see what I mean."

"Erm - I think so."ﾠ She grinned at him.ﾠ "If you like I'll listen out for what people say: I'm sure most of it will be complimentary."

Severus tapped herﾠwrist sharply with one finger.ﾠ "Don't commit yourself to anything whichﾠmay oblige you to repeat material you may find - distressing.ﾠ Not everybody is as pleased by my recovery as you seem to think."

"Well, I did hear aﾠfirst-year comparing you to a vampire this morning. He sounded quite impressed, though."

Severus coughed, a sudden choking laugh.ﾠ "I can't complain, can I - that _is_ rather the effectﾠI was going for.ﾠ And it reminds me - I'd almost forgotten, but before I was... taken, last year, I was working on a spell for wandless flight.ﾠ I hadn't quite got it to go, yet - but think how I could terrorise my students if I could swoop down from the battlements, keening in a high voice..."

Hermione laughed too. "Well, I wouldn't object to being swooped on, myself, when you're up to it... but you'd have the students fainting and fleeing in droves, if you did it to them!" She tapped her chin thoughtfully. "Though a snarl might be better than keening. You do a really good snarl, very tigerish. It used to frighten the life out of us."

"I should have my Slytherins fainting in coils, but it doesn't work on most of them, unfortunately - they can tell when I'm really angry and when I'm putting it on.ﾠ I've been trying to get Crabbe to study, but I don't think I'm really getting through and God knows, he really needs the extra revision."

Hermione shivered. "Oh, don't talk about revision and exams," she said, managing a rueful smile. "Exams frighten the life out of me, they always have. Ask Harry... he's watched me go into hysterics at the end of every year we've been here, at least the ones where we actually had exams. I am revising, even if it's not quite as much as usual," she added quickly. "Don't worry about me. Honestly, being with you works better to keep me from getting all panicky than revising the same material over and over, anyway."

"The trick, you understand, is to revise a wide breadth of material adequately, rather than a small amount of material obsessively." He frowned down his long nose at her. "I should be relieved to be a cause of you not panicking, but concerned to be a cause of your not reaching your full potential. If necessary, we may have to forego nights of passion for the last couple of weeks before NEWTs, to make sure you get enough sleep to focus."

Hermione nodded. "My trouble was that I revised everything obsessively. All my notes, for _years_." She squeezed his hand gently. "I will study hard - and you do make a good book-stand, sometimes. But..." She smiled up at him. "You're not keeping me from my full potential. And, uh, _that_ does help me sleep well, once we go to sleep. Much better than I usually do with exams coming. Think of it as keeping me from getting too anxious."

"Very well. I must say I would be sorry to return to being celibate, even for a few weeks, and I will just have to refrain from giving you any cause for anxiety until after the exams." He paused and pulled a face. "That's actually getting easier - not being a cause of anxiety in others unless I mean to be, I mean. I haven't had a serious panic fit since - you know." Hermione nodded her understanding and made a vague encouraging noise. "But if I do seem anxious to you, it may be because I worry about... about having to give evidence. Consigning students to Azkaban, even if they are vicious little - How is Miss Patil - Parvati, that is - coping? Did I tell you she apologised to me for what her sister... I thought she'd hate me, but not a bit of it."

"You didn't, and... I'm glad she did." She fiddled absently with her hair. "She's miserable, of course, but her friends are staying close, and I think she's doing a bit better. She certainly doesn't agree with Padma, no matter what a few of the Slytherins say." He tensed a little, and she shook her head. "Oh, only that rotten faction who're open supporters of his. Everyone knows - I've made quite _sure_ everyone knows - that they don't speak for the whole of Slytherin. So has Pansy." She smiled a little. "Another thing we have in common. At this rate, we might even be friends one day." About as likely as pigs flying... but then, at one time she'd have said the same of Severus and Harry ever having a civil conversation.

Severus glanced across at Pansy, who did appear to be studying but who confirmed that she still had at least one eye on him by looking up and sticking her tongue out at him, then grinning at his fierce scowl. "She is excellent at multi-tasking." Behind him, he knew, Jaquin - who had superb eyesight, and had replaced Draco as the Slytherin Seeker - was poised higher up towards the castle's foot, gazing down on the view, including himself, with a kind of conscious nobility whilst remaining far enough away that any potential attacker wouldn't be able to take both of them with a single shot. "She may be, and at times is, a little spiteful and inclined to bully verbally - but I've never known her to hex anyone without good cause, so she's one up on the Weasley Twins as far as that goes."

"More than a little spiteful... but girls usually save the spite for other girls." Hermione chuckled, amused by Pansy's silly little gesture of defiance. "We may have loathed each other, but it was never as bitter as it was for Harry and Draco... or you and the Marauders, certainly. We'd happily shove each other into a muddy puddle... but not off a cliff." She squeezed his hand again. "If there's anything I can do to make it easier for you," she said softly, "do let me, please? We can try to keep from being too nervous together."

"It's not that I'm nervous about the trial: it's the idea of condemning two students - _my students_, children I've taught - to the Dementors." He shivered. "Don't let's talk about it now. I just want to enjoy this, here, now, with you."

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Dinner in the Great Hall was less dramatic than breakfast had been, but scarcely less unnerving. He had been accustomed to looking up to find a sprinkling of students staring at him as he ate, and had hardened himself to their hostility: but to find that nearly all of the starers smiled if he caught their eye, or ducked their heads in polite acknowledgement, was a new experience.

Queasily, he realised that by now at least the rough outline of what had been done to him must be known to the whole school - he could name forty or fifty students with close relatives who had played an active part in it, and it was too juicy a piece of gossip to hope that all of them had kept it to themselves. But almost none of the smiles looked mocking, or even pitying; just - amazingly - genuinely pleased to see that he was doing better, and warily respectful; and the artery-clogging steak-and-kidney pudding settled in his stomach without the clenching, nervous indigestion he had been used to associate with eating at the staff table.

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"Come on Professor, there's a good lad." Neville propped himself up from the mattress on one eldow and patted the older man's upper arm as Severus gasped and twisted, his eyes tightly closed. "Wake up now, good boy."

"If you persist in treating me like a dog, Longbottom, I shall bite, I warn you." His coal-black lashes drifted open and he gazed up at the blasted boy, trying to re-orient himself. After a moment he sighed and relaxed.

"Was it - bad?" Neville asked quietly, and Severus frowned at him.

"Actually - no. Not - not really. At least, I was in pain but - " He smiled faintly. "I dreamed about being found. About being brought to the hospital wing, and being in absolute howling bloody agony and then suddenly _not_ being. Quite... abruptly."

He grimaced, twisting his scarred mouth. "I was still in great pain, of course, and unimagineably tired, but I wasn't so _afraid_ any more and I wasn't... I wasn't struggling to scream and I was in a bed and it was warm and light and Addie - Addie took the pain away, most of it, anyway, as if he was painting it out. Hermione washed my hair for me and I was clean and everybody was being so calm and quiet and it just - I wouldn't have believed that sheer bloody relief could be such a powerful emotion.

"I know, I remember that initially I was still in what one would normally consider to be extreme discomfort and..." He gestured at his stomach, bisected by a vertical scar under the nightshirt, and then at his face, and Neville nodded soberly. "It is... distressing to remember that and the fact that you felt the need to wake me shows that I was... distressed, but overall I would say dreaming about it was... it wasn't bad."

"That sounds - well, more positive, like. That you're dreaming about - well, about being healed instead of about being hurt."

"Yes. When I remember that time now, it no longer feels like the final stage of my t-torment but the first stage of - " He gestured widely, encompassing a circle of good things including Neville himself, and even Trevor. "All this. It encourages feelings of safety, rather than - rather than fear."

"That's good, then."

"That depends on whether I actually am safe, or just lulling myself into a sense of false security, and that - " He stopped, distracted, hearing a scratching at the glass. "And _that_, if I'm not mistaken, is your maiden voyage at the window, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor."

Nevile padded across the floor in his pyjamas, which were decorated with the same Gladrags' finest green and pink rabbits as Dumbledore's dressing gown, and let in the post-owl which was carrying his mint-new copy of the _Bulletin of Botanical Magic_. Severus heaved himself up into a sitting position and they settled down happily together to pore over Neville's first published article and nitpick the typesetting.

With a complex pang, Severus remembered the paper he was working on with Adrian and Poppy - a paper which could not help but lay bare his miserable degradation to the world, whilst at the same time showcasing his iron competence and detachment and his dispassionate intellect, and thereby sticking two of his remaining fingers up at the tormentors who had failed to destroy him. _I am still here_, he thought, and unnerved Longbottom with a sudden, eldritch smile.

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"And you're... all right about this being printed, liek, and people knowing that they...?"

Severus looked at Addie and sighed. "The ones who have Death Eater parents - and are still on speaking terms with them - know anyway, and I'd be surprised if they haven't spread the news. I overheard two of Bennet's nasty little cronies sniggering about it behind my back this morning, and I had to intervene to prevent the honour guard _du jour_ from doing murder."

"Ugh. That must be - really nasty. Upsetting."

"For a moment, it made me feel quite - " He looked away towards the window, breathing deeply, and saw the silver flash of a fish, changing course to glance past just on the far side of the glass. "I was sorely tempted _not_ to prevent Hennessy and Bulstrode from killing them, believe me. But if I write about it myself, then I own it and they can't - they can't shame me with it. Also - " He tapped his nails against the work surface which doubled as a desk, gathering his nerve. "Also, they were somewhat behind the news as regards my... sexual status." Still unable to bring himself to look Addie in the face, he missed the younger man's sudden grin, quickly suppressed.

"You will understand that this refers to..." He flushed, indicating the spiky scrawl which described in impersonal terms and minimal detail his physical re-awakening; his reassertion of control over his own sexual responses. "That, ah, Hermione and I..."

This time, the grin was unmissable. "Aah aye, Ah realized weeks agoo tha' yee an' the Thothlet were at it, leik."

"That isn't _quite_ how I would have put it myself, but fundamentally, yes. Which, I suppose, makes you in some sense my brother-in-law, as well as hers, which I'll admit I find quite... pleasing." He sipped his coffee, looking down and still avoiding Adrian's eyes. "Of course, I am very sensible of the fact that she is - very much too young for me."

Adrian gave him a strange look. "This is Hermione we're talking about. I think you might be a bit young for her, leik. Seriously."

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"Don't fuss, Minnie. I couldn't bring myself to take points from my own house, so I told Horace about it - as acting Head of House - and he set them both a four-foot essay entitled 'Why I am unlikely ever to get laid or to build up a useful social network until I learn some manners and human sympathy, and stop being a giggling, unappetising little psychopath.' With loss of Hogsmeade privileges from now until they leave school if they don't do a proper job of it." He steepled his fingers, thoughtfully. "He also, as I understand it, reminded them that in a year's time it will almost certainly be me who writes them the references which may, if I so choose, ensure that they spend their entire careers mucking out Hippogriff pens."

"Would you do so, do you think, if they dinnae mend their ways?"

"Watch me."

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"I'm quite sure," Severus said, peering rather short-sightedly at the pretty little coloured Oriental pictures, "that a lot of these are just - gymnastic exercises designed to prove how flexible one is, or the product of an over-heated imagination. I mean, look at that one - does that look comfortable to you? Or even possible? Even if I could get into that position - which I doubt, although I suppose you never know till you try - I don't think either of us would be able to move once we were in place, which would be very frustrating. And supposing one got cramp - or, worse, pulled a muscle?"

"It doesn't bear thinking about, does it? I'll have to try and get hold of a wizarding version - I'm sure there must be one - and then we'll be able to see if they can move!"

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"I think I'm getting the hang of it," Harry said thoughtfully, pushing an untidy lock of hair out of his eyes with his wand. "It's a bit like acting - not that I've ever _done_ any acting - "

"Don't underestimate yourself, Potter. You've acted often enough when you were spinning me some line or other."

"Didn't fool you, though, did I? I need this to be convincing. I need to _feel_ that what I'm showing old Mouldyshorts is true, even though I know it isn't."

"Yes, precisely - you're making some progress at last." He chose to ignore Harry's almost inaudible answering murmur - something about faint praise. "And thank you for not using the, um, V-word."

"Y'welcome" Harry replied with a flashing grin.

"Er - Potter. I've been meaning to ask you - "

"Yayuss?"

"Don't get too cocky - I haven't had a personality transplant. I've been meaning to ask whether it would be possible, at some point, to, um, borrow your Invisibility Cloak for a few days. Or even a few hours, possibly."

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Remus bit his lip. "I still worry that there's something we haven't thought of. Severus are you sure you've covered all the bases? The fact that you're going about now, that you're living a normal life - what if that provokes them into acting in a way we haven't allowed for?"

"No system is a hundred percent secure, I suppose, but I'm happy that my security arrangements are as nearly foolproof as they can be. I am sure of my team: and _don't_," he added, with a glare at the other three, "say that I trusted Greengrass. That was before the _Fides Nota_, and besides I was - less aware, then."

"My darling cousin is a consummate little liar," Tonks said moodily.

"I say the risk is unacceptable," Moody growled, "and - " but Severus cut across him.

"But I am the one who is at risk here, and _I_ say the risk is within bounds. As strange as it may seem, I would trust Draco with my life."

Tonks looked at him soberly. "You may have to."

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[Excerpt from letter from Hermione's parents]

_As for Professor Snape, well, of course we were a little surprised... though you did always seem very impressed by his intellect! Hermione darling, you know we trust your judgement. Your father and I want you to be happy - and safe, if that's possible these days - and it seems that while you're with Professor Snape, you're both. Please give him our best, and tell him that we're glad to hear that you're so happy. That said, we would like to meet him, dear. We're your parents, it's rather expected that he should at least come to dinner some time. Of course, depending on what is going on at your end, I do understand that that may not be very safe just now. But if you can come home for a visit, do... and bring him. _

_Your father says to tell him not to worry about us being overprotective. If we were, we'd have pulled you out of school when the war started, and gone to your great-auntie Stephanie in France. If we let you face an actual war, he says, we can manage an older man who can at least hold an intelligent conversation. And it's not as if he were our age, after all. _

_Do try to write often, Hermione. We know there's not much we can do for you besides keeping our heads down and letting you get on with it, but we worry. Take care, love. _

_With all our love _

_Mum and Dad _

* * *

**Author's note:**

"The best of British luck" is a stock phrase used when you think somebody is going to need luck in order to achieve something, and the difficulty they are facing is at least somewhat amusing rather than urgent or tragic.

"Fainting in coils" (a play on painting in oils) was, famously, one of the lessons the Mock Turtle learned from the Drawling master at school in _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_.

Well, we may not have made it for Christmas, but it's here now - despite the twin distractions of child-rearing in Dyce's case, and in mine working on a family history and on _A true original_, a long memorial essay about my friend John Nettleship, who was JK Rowling's Chemistry teacher and the main model for Snape, and who sadly died of cancer in March 2011. Interested readers can find this memorial essay at www. whitehound. co. uk/Fanfic/A_true_original. htm.

I have not updated "our" Minerva to match the new background provided in Pottermore, because I can't yet see a way to do so without losing too much of her dialogue and character.


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